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Master’s Degree in

Language Sciences

Final Thesis

Washington Square:

From the Novel to the Screen

Supervisor

Ch. Prof. Michela Vanon Alliata

Assistant Supervisor

Ch. Prof. Simone Francescato

Graduand

Alessandro Decarolis

871857

Academic Year

2017/2018

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Index

Introduction 5

Henry James’s Biography 7

Washington Square and Aestheticism 9

The Germ 14

The Novel 15

International Setting 18

Catherine and the Relationship with Her Father 22

Doctor Sloper’s Irony and Cold Rationality 27

Catherine’s Simplicity and the Power of Money 29

Naturalness and Cleverness 34

Catherine and Her Quest for Freedom 37

The Fifth Kind of Will 39

Morris’s Social Freedom 44

American Society 46

America vs Europe 50

Style and Genre 53

Reviews of Washington Square 60

The New York Edition 62

Film Adaptations

Origins and the Risks of Adaptation 65

Adaptations Theorized 69

How to Adapt a Literary Text 71

Adapting the Past 73

William Wyler’s Biography 74

Introduction to The Heiress 76

Ideation and Casting for The Heiress 77

The Heiress (1949) 83

From Washington Square to The Heiress 90

Women’s Freedom and Luxury Goods 92

Catherine’s Three Phases 94

The Symbolism of Objects and Space 97

Conclusion 103

Bibliography 104

Sitography 106

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Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to thank my Supervisor, Professor Michela

Vanon Alliata, who allowed me to choose the subject for my thesis and

showed her enthusiasm about it from the very beginning. I thank her

because she has always been willing to help me at every stage of my

research, giving me precious advices.

I would also like to thank my Assistant Supervisor, Professor Simone

Francescato, who accepted to be an additional guide for my study.

Additionally, I would like to thank my sister, who has been my

roommate during my years in Venice and who constantly cheered me up

and encouraged me to do my best.

I thank my parents, for they have allowed me to study far from home

and because they have never stopped believing in me, even those times in

which I was so close to give up. Nothing of all this would have been

possible without them.

I would like to thank Roxanna, who has constantly helped me in

improving my English, especially my speaking and listening abilities.

Finally, I thank the rest of my family, who has always supported me

and kept sending me messages on the days of my exams in order to

motivate me.

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Abstract

Washington Square is a novel by Henry James published in 1880. It

examines the effects of the father-daughter relationship, but it also inspects

the ongoing changes in the America of James’s time and how they affected

that country considering the economical, social and psychological aspect.

Despite it is not the most popular work written by James, Washington

Square later inspired a lot of theatrical, cinematic adaptations and other

works by other authors. One of the most popular adaptation of Washington

Square is the movie The Heiress directed by the celebrated William Wyler

in 1949, that followed the 1947 play written by Ruth and Augustus Goetz.

The protagonist of the novel, Catherine, was performed by the brilliant

Olivia de Havilland who, for that role, also won an Oscar for Best Actress.

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Introduction

This thesis is based on studies and research I did on Henry James’s

novel Washington Square and on William Wyler’s film adaptation “The

Heiress”. After glancing over Henry James’s life, I started considering the

first publication of James’s work and how it was even visually represented

thanks to George du Maurier’s illustrations. Du Maurier’s contribution was

essential to the distribution of Washington Square both in America and

Europe, and to highlight that James was a pioneer of American

Aestheticism. Going on, I examined the importance of that anecdote which

drew James’s attention and that eventually gave him the inspirational basis

for his novel. Analyzing the novel, many aspects came to light and

demonstrated how James dealt with many kinds of topics and issues in it.

One of them is Catherine’s difficult relationship with her father and with

his authority. Not only she is alone in her fight with no one to support her,

but she also finds in the other main characters around her people who try to

oppress her. Each one of these other characters has his/her own

peculiarities and they all raise different issues. Doctor Sloper embodies an

unloving example of fatherhood, Morris is a fortune-haunter who cannot

find his place in the American society and Aunt Penniman a widow who

has her own delusional vision of life. Additionally, I presented the

importance of the international setting in this work and how it is crucial

here as well as in James’s other works. It is meaningful because throughout

his entire life, James had an ongoing inner fight in which he was divided

between his native land, the United States, and Europe, the continent

inhabited by history and a more refined culture. Moreover, I discussed

James’s choice of genre and style in Washington Square, taking several

authors as examples to follow, but eventually creating his own style and

identity as writer. To gather all of his works in a single and vast project,

James planned The New York Edition. It represented his final and biggest

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effort, for James described and explained the processes behind his works in

it. He also chose to keep Washington Square out of it and I tried to collect

and investigate the reasons behind his decision.

After the first part concerning James’s novel, I briefly introduced film

adaptations. I examined the initial phases in the history of film adaptations

and how initially they were criticized and seen as inferior. It was an issue

connected with the idea that literature and books as medium were

considered pure while, on the other hand, movies were judged incomplete

and imperfect. I also shortly described various aspects which belong to

adaptations, how adaptations can be defined and which are those elements

that can be transposed from a medium to another. Furthermore, there are

guidelines to follow when adapting a literary work and when making

historical adaptations. But there are sentiments they provoke in the

audience too and, as a matter of fact, they have to take viewers’ taste and

needs into account when adaptations are produced.

A quick examination of William Wyler’s life and career is followed by

the description of circumstances that brought to the production of The

Heiress. I analyzed the characters from the movie, its plot and relevant

events, comparing them with the novel and noticing what has been changed

and what has been kept the same or, at least, similar to it. Furthermore, I

focused on techniques Wyler employed in order to emphasize the role of

objects, surroundings, costumes and details in the movie. These techniques,

like, for instance, camera angles and close-ups, make viewers better

understand the situation, sometimes even giving them hints on what is

about to come. They also are used to emotionally involve spectators,

making them feeling empathy towards characters’ issues, joys and doubts.

In the end, I examined the reception of The Heiress, especially by the

female American audience, and how the movie accentuates the relevance of

an important issue like women’s independence.

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Henry James’s Biography

Henry James was born at 2 Washington Place in New York City on the

15th of April in 1843, the second son of Henry James Sr. and Mary Walsh.

His father was a lecturer and a philosopher, follower of the

Swedenborgianism; his mother was a New Yorker coming from a wealthy

family. Their eldest and Henry’s older brother was the celebrated

philosopher and psychologist, William James, while Henry also had two

younger brothers, Wilkinson and Robertson, and a younger sister, Alice.

James did not receive the typical education in Greek and Latin classics,

but his father exposed him to different scientific and philosophical

influences. After Henry’s adolescence, his family traveled for some years

among European cities, and it strongly affected the young man that,

especially in their stay in France, sensed a feeling of belonging and became

fluent in the language of the place. It is also curious how he had a stutter

speaking in English, but he did not expressing himself in French.

His family returned to Newport in 1860 and here Henry was introduced

to French literature by the painter John La Farge, but more particularly to

Honoré de Balzac, one of the authors that most inspired James’ work. A

year later James, in an attempt to fight a fire, injured his back and it made

him inadequate to participate in the American Civil War.

In 1864 James’ family will move again, this time to Boston,

Massachusetts. In that same State, Henry attended Harvard Law School,

not finishing his studies to pursue his literary interests. His first published

work was a review of a stage performance, “Miss Maggie Mitchell in

Fanchon the Cricket” in 1863 and, a year later, James published

anonymously his first short story, A Tragedy of Error. He also wrote for

The Nation and Atlantic Monthly, where James Fields was his editor. His

first novel, Watch and Ward, was serially published in 1871 in the Atlantic

Monthly.

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During a European trip that lasted fourteen months, James met many

renowned authors and Dickens, Ruskin and George Eliot among them. In

1869, James settled in London writing and publishing other serialized

novels principally received by a public of middle-class women. He lived in

rented rooms, but he entered illustrious clubs of the English society, like

Reform and Travellers’ clubs.

When he returned to New York, in 1874-75 he published Transatlantic

Sketches, A Passionate Pilgrim and Roderick Hudson. Though this was his

last stay in the United States, apart from a couple of trips there, because,

after he decided to move to Paris, he spent in Europe the rest of his

existence. Here James met Maupassant, Turgenev and Zola, and later he

moved to London.

Even in England, James kept publishing: The American (1877), The

Europeans (1878), French Poets and Novelists (1878), Hawthorne (1879)

are among the most important works. Daisy Miller, in 1878, drew attention

upon him because the main character of the novella was a woman that lived

not respecting the rules of the European society. In the same year and the

next one he published Confidence, Washington Square and started working

on his masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady, finally published in 1881.

Unfortunately the publication of the latter was followed by a period in

which the author had to face several family losses: his mother, his father

and, in the end, his brother Wilkinson.

In 1884, he visited Paris again, hoping to feel inspired by his French

realist models. Therefore he met with Zola, Daudet and Gouncourt once

more and their influence was clear in James’s novels The Bostonians and

The Princess Casamassima, both published in 1886. Even after publishing

another novel, The Tragic Muse, James felt pressured by the failure, both

critical and monetary, of his works.

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It was the reason why he started writing for the theater, but in 1895,

when his play Guy Domville was first staged in London, it was a complete

debacle. This occurrence made him feel hopeless about his career and his

abilities as a writer, but his studies on dramatic works later gave their

results. James used them in the last phase of his career, for many of his

most renewed works were written during this late stage. In his long stay in

Italy, he published The Aspern Papers and The Reverberator. Later, when

he decided to go to live in England, between 1897 and 1904 he wrote The

Turn of the Screw, The Awkward Age, The Sacred Fount, The

Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. After he also

published The American Scene and The New York Edition, in 1910 his

brother William died. The latter was remembered in many memories and

reflections within James’s autobiographies A Small Boy and Others and

Notes of a Son and a Brother. In 1915 James received the British

citizenship and one year later, more precisely on the 28th of February 1916,

he died in London.

Washington Square and Aestheticism

Washington Square is a novel that was devised by James in the autumn

of 1879, just before starting to write The Portrait of a Lady and after he

terminated Hawthorne, his novel Confidence and his short story “A Bundle

of Letters”. At the beginning, it was serially published in 1880 in Cornhill

Magazine (it was meant to be the final piece of a trilogy that began with

Daisy Miller) and there in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.

In the British Cornhill Magazine, Washington Square was accompanied

by illustrations made by the caricaturist George du Maurier. He was

famous because of his work for the British satirical magazine, Punch, and,

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more specifically, for his parody of the Aesthetic Movement, for creating

imaginary characters based on actual exponents of the Aestheticism.

The novel was a double first time for James, for it was his first novel to

be accompanied by illustrations and, with its publication, he was given the

opportunity to have it serialized in both America and Europe. The twelve

illustrations prepared for Washington Square by du Maurier were printed

on the Cornhill Magazine in Britain in 1880, more precisely from June to

November. The American version of the work (this time a book) was

published by Harper and Brothers in December of the same year. In du

Maurier’s sketches, the physiognomic traits of the cosmopolitan fortune-

haunter, Morris Townsend, were inspired by the most popular member of

Aestheticism, Oscar Wilde.

Writing about taste and money in America, James was drawing

attention to the fact that Aestheticism was not present in British society as

well as in Transatlantic society. Du Maurier’s drawings emphasized Henry

James’s work and helped his novel in becoming popular in the European

continent as well.

Since Washington Square was set in the New York of the 1850s and it

presented characteristics of the Aestheticism between 1870 and 1880, these

features gave resonance to the task James was trying to accomplish: to

insert American Aestheticism in the Aesthetic tradition. James gave it

dignity by also treating American social and cultural history, and it served

to demonstrate how the American, and not only the British, society

participated to the Aesthetic debate as well.

With works like Roderick Hudson and The Europeans, James had

already started to explore the world of the aesthetic culture. Its full

realization came with the publication of Washington Square and du

Maurier’s artistic contribution. Many critics considered the illustrations that

accompanied James’s work as disappointing. As a matter of fact, du

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Maurier’s drawings took inspiration from his caricatures on the Punch and

this aspect gave James the opportunity to show how his work took into

consideration aesthetic values and debates. Apart from the taste for art and

beauty, the transatlantic Aestheticism was especially concerned with

money and commercial aspects.

The perfect example is embodied by Morris Townsend, where his

passion for European travels, squandering money and leading a “wild”1

young life is closely connected to his role in the society. Morris, portraying

the figure of the aesthete, does not have a defined and fixed place in

American society. The aesthetic phenomenon can only exist in a society

that is not static and that is undergoing perpetual changes, and that is the

exactly the case of Washington Square, where Morris an “infiltrate”

defying social hierarchies and Doctor Sloper’s view of the world.

Du Maurier’s illustrations helped James in rendering and perfecting the

protagonists’ traits of Washington Square. The caricaturist not only

parodied the character of the aesthete, but also the American young

woman. He viewed the type of person as more natural but also clumsier

than the English woman. In addition, the women who decided to adhere to

the aesthetical views were usually older than their partners, and they often

were willing to even marry for poverty (and not despite it), for they thought

that simplicity was a noble ideal. Ironically, Morris, the aesthete, has more

taste than money, while Catherine is his opposite, soft-hearted but

determined.

Significantly du Maurier drew Morris’s appearance taking inspiration

from the most popular personification of the values of the Aestheticism,

Oscar Wilde. In his depiction of Morris, du Maurier sketched him with his

body curled up in a strange kind of letter “C”, a pose that recalls a

homosexual stereotype easily associated to Wilde; Morris’s long hair is

1 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 35.

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also another physical characteristic that links him to the famous Irish

aesthete.

In contrast with Morris’s moral ugliness, Catherine’s is nowhere to be

found in du Maurier’s illustrations. James depicts the poor girl as

unattractive, large and not clever, but not even one of those flaws is

traceable looking at his sketches of Catherine. This motive is because like

James presented the female protagonist intensifying her blemishes above

all, using an ironic and indifferent tone towards her, in the same way the

illustrator caught in his own work what is actual ugliness and what is not,

being so familiar with the Aesthetic Movement.

Some critics claim that du Maurier’s illustrations for Washington

Square were closer to the British and not to the American taste2, but this

actually was the caricaturist’s goal, even if the entire novel is set on

American soil. This brought critics to also consider James as the

quintessentially American aesthete, where James was often compared to

Morris. Unfortunately, these sometimes even offensive comments that saw

him as a Wilde’s follower or as his American version were not what James

sought, even if he tried many times to distance himself from the British

member of the Aestheticism.

The Aestheticism finds its incarnation in Aunt Penniman as well. She

insists throughout the novel on plotting various ways to arrange Catherine

and Morris’s encounters and she is ready to do it even behind his brother’s

back in order to achieve her purposes.

«James’s satire of Mrs Penniman emphasises his own critique of the Aesthetic

Movement as a whole: she shows no concern for decency or morality and only values

superficial beauty and romantic quality. She is unwilling to acknowledge the

2 M. Mendelssohn, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, p. 79.

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inappropriateness of her relationship with Townsend, and delights in her tawdry trysts

with him.»3

She perfectly represents the type of the female aesthete who is older

than her suitor. Aunt Penniman idealizes Morris so much that, in the first

part of the novel, she compares him to her dead husband and, going

forward, she even thinks that he should have been the man she should have

married.

Morris is indolent, has refined and expensive tastes, he has no

profession and lives on other people’s expenses. When Doctor Sloper is

away during his journey in Europe, Morris transforms the doctor’s office in

his own private club, smoking at the doctor’s desk, enjoying the taste of

living in such a rich environment working his way through society and

using his good manners rather than his dedication to find an actual job.

Another resemblance between Morris and Wilde is that they both love

money, and, as a matter of fact, Morris is willing to marry Catherine in

order to obtain it. On the other hand, Wilde’s love for money has been a

matter James continuously pointed out criticizing it. A good example could

be the lecture tour that Wilde undertook in American, where Americans

were aware of its financial implications.

Morris and Wilde are also connected thanks to one more peculiarity:

they both excel in the oratorical art. Morris’s talkativeness, at the beginning

of the novel, is what strikes Catherine, the naturalness of his discourse and

how, in this way, he gives her the possibility to remain silent, listening to

him and contemplating his beauty.

Morris’s character demonstrates that there was not just a single way to

depict the American man, but that the cosmopolitan idler and the art lover

could also exhibit different shades. The Americans loved to read about

themselves, furthermore they had ambiguous feelings towards British 3 Ibid., p. 72.

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people, admiring and despising them at the same time. That is one more

reason why Washington Square was so appreciated by James’s compatriots

who could find there in the portrayal of the Europeanized American.

It was not easy for James to unite the American and the European

world, since the author himself knew they were pretty diverse. The British

editor W. E. Henley was aware of James’s ability to succeed in the task (it

had been proved with the publication of Washington Square), encouraged

him in doing so and this brought James to write Daisy Miller. For the

American readers were impatient to know more about the European world,

but also to find some familiar elements about themselves. Finally, it should

not be forgotten that the greater part of the profit derived from the

American market and that is why it was so important to satisfy it, giving

readership what they wanted.

Aesthetic societies in America existed even before Wilde’s arrival to

the States. The movement found its development during the post-Civil War

period, when the aesthetic taste for art collecting and its ideas about nature,

beauty and religion was a response to the previous tragic historical

fragment that Americans had lived and were trying to overcome.

The Germ

The plot of Washington Square is inspired by an anecdote that a friend

of Henry James’s, the famous actress Fanny Kemble, told him.

This was about her brother’s engagement to Miss T., a “dull, plain,

common-place girl”4 (the same adjectives Henry James uses in the novel

when he refers to Catherine Sloper, the protagonist) who had a great

fortune of £4000 per year. While the girl was in love with this handsome

but also two-faced man, he was plotting to take advantage of her money

and to use it for his own worldly pleasures. Her father took position against

4 M. Simpson, Introduction in Henry James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. ix.

15

their marriage plan and warned her that she would not have a single penny

if she married the young man.

The girl asked for advice to Fanny, who counseled her to not marry her

brother, because he would have been gentle to her only if things had gone

well. If that had not happened, Fanny told the girl that the young man

would have behaved in an unpleasant manner, causing her to feel wretched

and condemned to his intolerable company.

When Fanny’s brother opted for leaving, the girl inherited her father’s

money after he died. Time passed and the fortune-haunter returned in the

hope that they could finally get married, but she rejected him even though

she was still enamored of him and resolved to never marry another man.

Mona Simpson, in her introduction to the novel, highlights Henry

James’s genius and creativity for transforming such an usual event, nothing

more than pure gossip during those years, in a masterpiece. James used the

scheme of Fanny’s anecdote as the base for his story, to which he added his

own significance and a different ending. The most innovative element was

the character of Doctor Sloper, the real enemy in the story, where everyone

would expect the fortune-haunter to be the real threat.

Cynthia Ozick, talking about the anecdote, saw a connection between

the young man who leaves the heiress behind because she would be

disinherited if she married him, and Washington Square’s author leaving

his own native land and continent to flee to Europe.5

The Novel

In a grand house within the neighborhood of Washington Square, a

really simple girl in her early twenties, Catherine Sloper, lives with her

father, a renowned doctor and a quite unloving parent.

5 C. Ozick, James as Jilter: Absenteeism in Washington Square in The American Scholar, The Phi Beta Kappa Society, Autumn 2002, p. 56.

16

The narrator’s voice and his wit are really close to the doctor’s. Plus,

the narrator’s irony helps readers to understand that he is well aware that

Doctor Sloper’s celebrity was intensified also thanks to the public opinion

or, as the narrator calls it, the “popular voice”. Doctor Sloper achieved his

fame because of his intelligence and competence, but he just came from a

modest family of New York. Things (and the “popular voice”) started to be

in his favor when he

«Had made his mark sufficiently to mitigate the anomaly of his having been chosen

among a dozen suitors by a young woman of high fashion, who had ten thousand dollars

of income and the most charming eyes in the island of Manhattan.»6

Fortune seems to turn its back to Doctor Sloper when his son dies at

three years of age and, two years later, his wife dies too, while she was

giving birth to Catherine. The turn of events of the story seems tragically

ironic, as if Doctor Sloper had to pay for the luck that he assisted him

earlier in his life, just to be eventually punished.

Devoid of a motherly figure, the doctor decides that one of his sisters,

Lavinia Penniman, should take care of Catherine’s education and growth.

Like her brother, Aunt Penniman is a widow who abandoned the idea of

remarriage and, additionally, wore black for twenty years.

These two parental figures cannot give Catherine the love a daughter

needs and, ironically, the other aunt and Doctor Sloper’s sister, Elizabeth

Almond, is the only one that sincerely loves and cares for her.

Unfortunately she is already married and has to take care of her nine

children, uptown in New York and far from the turbulent events that take

place in Catherine’s life.

Doctor Sloper is not the only one to be punished though. His daughter,

Catherine, will be the victim of her father’s frustration and disappointment

6 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 3.

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throughout the entire novel. Catherine starts her life with a great sense of

loss: the loss of her mother and the loss of her father’s affection, that, more

precisely, she will never come to know. Since her birth, Catherine will

always represent nothing more than a sense of failure to the doctor, almost

a curse, a twist of fate.

In order to fill this void and to make amends for her constant feeling of

guilt, Catherine searches for her father’s approval, not longing for the

attention of any other man. Doctor Sloper’s thoughts and feelings point to

another direction, and he nearly does not consider Catherine as a daughter,

but rather as an experiment to study and observe.

His daughter actually surprises him at a party where they celebrate the

engagement of Aunt Almond’s daughter, Marian, with Arthur Townsend.

There Catherine draws the attention of Morris Townsend, Arthur’s cousin,

a handsome and garrulous young man whose intentions Doctor Sloper

seems to be well acquainted with. The doctor personally understands

Morris’s motivations and purposes because, before getting married, he was

looking for the same way of moving upward in social positions.

But Doctor Sloper does not only marry an intelligent and wealthy

woman, he also shows his propensity towards his rational sister Elizabeth

and his disdain for his fanciful sister Lavinia. His preference for Elizabeth

does not only come from the respect he shows to her, recognizing her as a

clever person, but also because of her marriage with a rich man, while the

other sister married only a poor clergyman.

Doctor Sloper’s hostile disposition towards Morris is a curious way to

express self-criticism. After all, he never actually forgives himself for the

unfortunate events that happened to him.

«Our friend, however, escape criticism; that is, he escaped all criticism but his own,

which was the most competent and most formidable. He walked under the weight of this

very private censure for the rest of his days, and bore forever the scars of a castigation

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to which the strongest hand he knew had treated him on the night that followed his

wife’s death.»7

To confirm his doubts about Morris, the doctor goes to pay Mrs.

Montgomery, Morris’s sister, a visit. He wants her to confess her brother’s

economical and spiritual unreliability and, after succeeding in moving the

poor woman with fake fatherly concern towards his daughter, she admits

the truth about Morris. Subsequently, the doctor almost feels guilty for the

methods he used in order to force the kind woman to poorly talk about her

brother, but, returning to his usual self, he shuts down the softest part of

him. He is aware that he humiliated Mrs. Montgomery, but his social status

and his intelligence make him feel to have every right to feel superior to

every person that stands in front of him.

Aunt Almond has a satisfactory life as a mother and a wife and,

consequently, is sincerely concerned for Catherine’s destiny. After hearing

from her brother that her niece is unmovable in her decision to be with

Morris, she notices that Doctor Sloper is pretty amused by the news. He, as

a scientist and a doctor, wants to discover how Catherine would handle the

fight between her love for Morris and her adoration for her father. This

discordance inside her would create a “third element”8, as he calls this

phenomenon.

International Setting

Italy always was an important country for Henry James, to which he

felt connected and enamored of. It occupied a relevant place in James’s real

life and formation, but it was also meaningful in some of his works. Italy,

and more in general the international setting, was used as a location where

central events of the story took place. Even if these relevant episodes were

7 Ibid., p. 4. 8 Ibid., p. 122.

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set in Italy or another European country, most of the time their origins

could be found in American and English societies.

The international setting allows the author to write about feelings like

melancholia and mourning for something or someone lost, the loss of an

idealized situation that clashes with the daily and grey reality. These are

sentiments that can be treated by James because of the place in which these

situations are set. It would have not been possible for James to write about

such matters and to feel so inspired, if he had been in his too familiar native

land, America.

Additionally, the emotions of melancholia and mourning are not

explored in the usual manner, but from a social point of view, as they can

lead to a social change. One of them can be alienation, since characters

distance themselves from damaging social formations. James understood

how the social wounds also infects one’s psychology and that is the reason

why he destined some of his characters to live never-ending cycles of

misery.

In the so-called “Italian affairs”9, as a model that repeats itself, there is

a daughter who has an intense bond with her father. Unluckily, the father

ends up by “sacrificing” her and their relationship for something of a

higher value to him and this modus operandi has a long tradition in literary

history. The paternal callousness comes from the father’s insecurity about

his own paternity, bringing him to cause damage to his daughter.

Washington Square was written while James was also working on The

Portrait of a Lady, and that gave him the possibility to examine in depth

the dynamics in a relationship between a father and his daughter. This

novel seems to have nothing that recalls the setting of those “Italian affairs”

that have been cited before, but the truth is that Doctor Sloper’s cruelest

declarations to Catherine occur while the Alps serve as their landscape.

9 M.H. Ross, G. W. Zacharias, Tracing Henry James, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, p. 53.

20

The curiosity for the aforementioned “third element” leads the doctor to

bring Catherine on a six-month journey in Europe, believing that she will

be more open to leave Morris after the trip. Catherine, on the contrary,

seems to not be moved and does not reveal any feeling to her father. In the

Italian Alps, Doctor Sloper finally decides to face the matter, asking her if

she is willing to give Morris up, but she answers negatively, causing his

anger. Catherine can feel the melancholy of the place in which the doctor

brought her, but this time is Doctor Sloper’s turn to surprise her, confessing

her that he knows he is a bad man.

This scene on the mountain is very similar to another mountain scene

taken from the ancient tradition: Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. In the

same way, Catherine, frightened, starts thinking that maybe her father took

her there to sacrifice her and to use violence to her. Going on, the doctor

even compares her to a sheep, commenting that her value now is even

higher before Morris kills her. As a matter of fact, Morris will act as Doctor

Sloper prophesized.

«“I have done a mighty good thing for him in taking you abroad; your value is

twice as great, with all the knowledge and taste that you have acquired. A year ago, you

were perhaps a little limited – a little rustic; but now you have seen everything, and

appreciated everything, and you will be a most entertaining companion. We have

fattened the sheep for him before he kills it.”»10

On the mountain, the character that is tested is not the father, but rather

the daughter. The “third element” finally appears before Doctor Sloper’s

eyes and it is Catherine’s transformation. The protagonist here speaks

openly against her father’s will and defies his authority.

«“Do you mean that in all this time you have not yielded an inch?”

“I would if I could Father, but I can’t.”

10 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 142.

21

The doctor looked round him too. “Should you like to be left in such a place as this,

to starve?”

“What do you mean?” cried the girl.

“That will be your fate – that’s how he will leave you.”

He would not touch her, but he had touched Morris. The warmth came back to her

heart. “That is not true, Father.” she broke out, “and you ought not to say it. It is not

right, and it’s not true.”»11

When the doctor admits that Morris is not a good man, he thinks so

remembering what he suffered, his losses, but this is how he sees himself,

using his own perspective. The truth is that Doctor Sloper is not a good

man because he manipulates people and because he does not offer medical

service to anyone, but only to wealthy people who can afford his

treatments.

Catherine, discovering her father’s cruelty, is liberated from his

authority and from any power he had on her. Moreover, when Doctor

Sloper, admitting his wicked nature, invites his daughter to hate him, she

refuses it. In doing so, Catherine establishes her own moral code and keeps

her dignity, even after all the emotional and psychological pain the doctor

caused to her.

At the end of Washington Square, when the doctor is on his deathbed,

he keeps nurturing his patronizing scorn towards his daughter, ordering her

to nurse him until his very last breath. Catherine obeys him and performs

her task. The question is that as she eventually chooses to remain

unmarried, it can be observed how she holds the same bitterness that

Doctor Sloper had. With his death, she has been condemned by her father,

in a very bizarre way, to take his place.

There is a hole in Catherine’s life and she tries her best to fill it, even

when her father hinders her, for she considers sulkiness and self-pity

11 Ibid., p. 140.

22

useless. Regrettably, in the end, Catherine is doomed to an unhappy life,

where her unsatisfied sexuality and inner feelings are not so visible, but

visible to the attentive reader.

Even though Catherine is not able to know the affection of her mother’s

love, the latter does help her to build her own independence, leaving her a

small fortune. Apart from her mother indirectly helping her through

economic legacy, Catherine confronts Doctor Sloper’s maliciousness,

Morris’s greed and Aunt Penniman’s silliness, maintaining and respecting

her own moral integrity.

Lastly, she finds some peace in dedicating her time and efforts in

charity work, assisting those people her father refused to have as patients.

Catherine rejects two marriage offers and when Morris returns after several

years, she finds the strength to dismiss him one last time.

Catherine and the Relationship with Her Father

Catherine’s relationship with her father starts to crack with the arrival

of Morris in her life. He is the reason of a chaotic battle in the protagonist’s

mind and he is also the person who indirectly questions her beliefs.

“Indirectly” because Morris actually understands and agrees on Doctor

Sloper’s philosophy of life. The example is given in the story when

Morris’s commitment to Catherine depends on her loyalty to her father. It

should actually be the exact contrary, because she risks (and eventually

loses) Doctor Sloper’s inheritance and what she thought was her father’s

affection in order to stay with Morris.

He finally betrays Catherine’s trust when he ends their engagement. He

himself was the first who asked her to never break the promise they made

to each other, to stay together at all costs. He does that when he discovers

the doctor has disinherited Catherine.

23

What brings the doctor to disinherit her right before his death is her

refusal to promise him that she will never marry Morris. It is pretty obvious

that Catherine would have never done that, but her final dare to the doctor

literally is both a way of punishing and provoking him. Morris’s last return

gives only another chance to Catherine to reject him and to seal their fates

once and for all.

Condemning herself to a solitary life without a partner or the happiness

that only a family can give, it seems that Catherine has to live buried alive

in Washington Square. Her condition is similar to the destiny that another

literary character has to endure: Antigone.

What Polynices symbolizes for Antigone, Morris symbolizes for

Catherine: both women suffer the departure of their beloved; but if

Morris’s departure is literal, Antigone has to face the death of her brother

Polynices, so that the term “departure” is interpreted in its most tragic

meaning. Catherine and Antigone are associated not only for the loss of

people who were dear to them, but, more significantly, because they are

deprived of the possibility to mourn for those losses. The act of depriving

them, in both cases, is made by figures who stand for the power of

authority.

Because of that power, Antigone is sentenced to be buried alive, as her

will to grieve for her brother’s remains is too strong and intense. Catherine,

playing the role of a “less tragic Antigone”, lives the rest of her life in such

an isolation that she ends up feeling melancholy. This is the result caused

by their limitation in expressing their emotions and in talking about them

explicitly. The heroines have to deal with scarcity and inadequacy of words

in their circumstances. Their linguistic issue reveals how fragile speeches

and discourses can be sometimes compared to the reality of the situation,

and how many restrictions language can have.

24

On Catherine, this linguistic insufficiency seems to be indirectly

imposed by her father’s behavior. She, in contrast to his sermons, remains

silent and keeps most of her thoughts to herself. Doctor Sloper shows to

always have something to say about anything and anyone, and his

knowledge seems to be without limits. This, at least, is what Catherine

believes for good part of the story. It is also what he forces himself to

believe until the moment of his death, when it is clear even to him that he

has to admit his ignorance and, consequently, his defeat. When Catherine is

able to control the same language her father uses, the “language of

authority”12, she will never renounce to it again.

Indeed, when the doctor insists that Catherine should not accept

Morris’s request for marriage, she refuses to keep that promise. With this

deed, Catherine loses the money she should have received and, more

importantly, she figuratively kills her father. The protagonist kills Doctor

Sloper because she turns against him the same language he exploits to

incapacitate whoever stands in his way. Additionally and logically,

Catherine cannot be blamed to have killed her father, for, as it has already

been said, she uses the authoritative language that consequently makes him

kill himself with his own hands.

Like Sophocles’s tragedy, Washington Square has its most remarkable

and fateful moments in significant dialogues and speeches. The novel

places emphasis on language, how it is exploited, employed and denied,

until it completely becomes a tragedy of language.

During the initial phases of the story, Catherine and Doctor Sloper

perfectly incarnate the two components of an ideal Oedipus complex.

Catherine looks at her father as the most intelligent and refined person in

the world, while the doctor can always count on his daughter’s adoration

and loyalty. Unfortunately, what seems to be a steady relationship, it will

12 T. Jukić, “An American Antigone: Henry James’s Washington Square”, The Errant Labor of the Humanities: Festschrift Presented to Stipe Grgas, Zagreb, FF Press, 2017.

25

not be able to last because of its being unbalanced. Doctor Sloper’s

fatherhood does not signify any kind of affection for his poor daughter, but

nothing else than power and authority over her.

What is more, there is also another problematic symptom in the father-

daughter relationship between the two characters, and it is the name that

Catherine has to bear, the same name that her mother had. It is not casual

that her father named her Catherine after his deceased wife, and it leads to

the conclusion that, at the bottom of their tie, there is incest.

“She had been named, as a matter of course, after her poor mother, and

even in her most diminutive babyhood the Doctor never called her anything

but Catherine.”13 It is weird and nearly unsettling how the doctor, even

after his wife’s death, refuses to stop calling her name, in a strange kind of

masochism.

The protagonist has to replace her dead mother as her father’s new

wife, but she fails because she does not have her mother’s beauty and

intelligence. She has only her mother’s name, nothing else, and that is what

makes incest only a distant concept in the story and not its focal point.

Later she also fails in proving her loyalty to her father, preferring to protect

her own interests and desires.

If Catherine has many points in common with Antigone, Doctor Sloper

does not play just one role, but he is both Antigone’s blind father, Oedipus,

and the man who sentences her to death, Creon.

Besides, the doctor, known as a famous physician in New York,

considers Catherine a dull girl. But, moving forward, the physician’s

opinion changes. As she becomes more mature, complex and challenging,

he does not see her as the heiress who deserves his money, but rather as a

medical abnormality that must be studied and cured. This is evident when,

talking to his sister Elizabeth, Doctor Sloper admits his curiosity to

13 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 4.

26

discover the third element Catherine will create from the circumstances she

has been facing.

From Doctor Sloper’s attitude towards Catherine comes his final will to

not give her his money, but to fund hospitals and similar medical

institutions instead, as if to support them in finding a cure for clinical cases

like his daughter. It is curious how Doctor Sloper’s research continues even

after his death.

As a matter of fact, Doctor Sloper’s death does not stop him from

keeping being present, in a certain way, in the story and it does not stop his

will from being done. On the contrary, the doctor’s pledges become

concrete after his physical disappearance, when Catherine does not receive

his money and when he succeeds in compelling her to live an unhappy and

solitary existence, abandoning her desire of marriage and Morris.

Paradoxically, Doctor Sloper fatherhood, perceived as authority, is more

alive when he is deceased.

Keeping his daughter from getting married, Doctor Sloper’s role in the

Oedipus complex that binds Catherine to him and vice versa is even more

apparent. Behaving like that, the doctor makes clear how he also stops his

daughter’s sexual desires from being expressed, repressing them in a weird

act of jealousy. But, as Doctor Sloper uses legacy to restrain the protagonist

from acting freely, legacy emerges as the only actual but also shallow

element that binds father and daughter.

The girl’s dullness and sometimes even misplacement within the

narration are accentuated during the European tour Catherine goes on with

her father. In the Alps, at a certain point, Doctor Sloper seems so

committed to put an end to his daughter’s life, but it unlikely is an act of

punishment towards Catherine. The fact that the gesture remains unfinished

shows how the doctor, returning to reason, understands that his plain

27

daughter could never make a difference and serve as a proper “sacrifice” to

placate his anger and frustration.

Catherine’s bareness is comparable with the bareness of the location

represented by the Alps and her life does not even deserve to be taken by

Doctor Sloper. The sacrifice of Catherine’s life cannot take place for her

existence is not so meaningful to be opposed to death. It is not a relevant

element in a balanced exchange that could solve or end the story, or at least

the solution to the enigma that Catherine embodies for Doctor Sloper.

When Catherine chooses to live in Washington Square in the end, it is

true that she seems to lead a repetitive and empty life, almost confirming

Doctor Sloper’s idea on her. Even though she excludes fatherhood from his

deceased father’s house, deciding to not marry anyone and to not live a life

devoted to a possible family, she is also doomed to a bare life.

As Doctor Sloper evaluates his own daughter a pathological case,

Catherine’s final state of melancholia can be the perfect, and yet pretty

ironic, example of another right diagnosis made by the renowned doctor.

The protagonist’s state of mind is properly connected and presented by the

end of the novel, that remains uncertain and as it if was interrupted.

Doctor Sloper’s Irony and Cold Rationality

It can be observed how Doctor Sloper can easily anticipate the outcome

of a situation or other characters’ behaviors. Still, he cannot read his

daughter’s mind and he cannot guess her intentions. That happens because,

in his reasoning, Doctor Sloper uses his mind scientifically and almost

seems to follow rules of mathematics and geometry. On the contrary,

Catherine bases her deeds following the reasons of her heart and,

obviously, if her father does not even try to understand her, he will never

be able to know what moves her to act like that.

28

As it has already been said, the doctor has some ideas and

psychological traits in common with Henry James, since even him uses the

comparison with geometry looking at the literary work. Fiction, in James’s

opinion, sometimes forces the author to write being enclosed in forms and

shapes prescribed by conventional rules and styles.

Irony, other than cold reason, is the matter of which Doctor Sloper is

made. He speaks in an ironic tone with all the characters, even with the

most similar ones to him, like his sister Elizabeth and Morris. Contrarily,

he intensifies his uses of it mostly with people he values greatly inferior to

him, like his sister Lavinia and Catherine. One of those rare occasions in

which Doctor Sloper does not rely on irony, it is when he is on his

European tour with Catherine, in the Alps, and he reveals his true nature to

her.

Furthermore, irony allows Doctor Sloper to discern two sides of every

situation, for he perceives the side connected to reality, how things truly

are, and the other one connected to irony, for it is not real but fictional.

Through the doctor’s way of looking at the events, the reader has the

feeling of knowing everything too. But James demonstrates, in the final

part of the story, how the doctor’s knowledge is limited and, killing two

birds with one stone, surprises the physician and the reader as well.

Catherine finds herself incapable of expressing her personality through

ironic discourses or thoughts, she actually does not even know what to do

when she receives ironic comments from her father.

«You would have surprised him if you had told him so, but it is a literal fact that he

almost never addressed his daughter save in the ironical form. Whenever he addressed

her he gave her pleasure; but she had to cut her pleasure out of the pieces, as it were.

There were portions left over, light remnants and snippets of irony, which she never

knew what to do with, which seemed too delicate for her own use; and yet Catherine,

lamenting the limitations of her understanding, felt that they were too valuable to waste,

29

and had a belief that if they passed over her head they yet contributed to the general sum

of human wisdom.»14

Catherine expresses herself through her extravagant taste in dressing

since she is not capable of doing it with words. She “lets the dresses talk in

her place”, but, not understanding her difficulty, people around her do not

judge her positively, just like Doctor Sloper. He even attacks her,

comparing her like he would do for a product with an exorbitant price: “

“You are sumptuous, opulent, expensive,” he continues. “You look as if

you had eighty thousand a year.” ”15

Initially in the story, the narrator himself refers ironically to Doctor

Sloper’s unfortunate life events before Catherine’s birth. He uses against

the doctor the same weapon he then utilizes against the other characters.

Moreover, life itself seems to have punished the physician who was not

able to save his wife and first child from death. Life gives the doctor its

final ironic response when Catherine refuses to tell him that she would

have fulfilled her promise to never marry Morris, and also when she does

not disclose to him her feelings and thoughts, letting him die in the

ignorance that uncertainty brings.

Catherine’s Simplicity and the Power of Money

Washington Square is a novel about money and its power. James’s

desire was to represent in his novel how money could affect people’s lives

and what people would to in order to save it or have more of it.

Perhaps James did not completely love money, but he, as a member of

the aristocratic society, respected its power. James lived in a century where

industry was increasingly progressing and, unfortunately for him, where the

14 Ibid., p. 21. 15 Ibid.

30

power given by money allowed many people to join aristocracy simply by

possessing a great amount of it.

The central figure of the novel, Catherine, has money and nearly

nothing else, as she lacks all the essential qualities a normal protagonist

should have. It is ironic how she does not embody the standard ideal of

heroine, but how, if anything, she entirely represents the usual character of

the second half of the nineteenth century fiction, an extremely rich

protagonist. In addition to the humble protagonist of the novel, its modesty

also lies in the fact that its most powerful scenes are set in a parlor.

In his epilogue to Washington Square, Michael Cunningham

contextualizes Catherine’s character in the novel:

«She has only steadiness and honesty, which puts her in company with Herman

Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener and hardly anyone else in literature. She is, in a

particular sense, the most distilled of James’ characters, in that her story hinges entirely

on her fortune. Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, Milly Theale in The Wings of

the Dove, and other heroines in James’ oeuvre have more to offer. Money affects their

lives profoundly but, if they lacked money, they would still be people worth writing

novels about. If Catherine had no money, she would have no story at all.»16

Catherine is not a “scenic” type of person, meaning that she does not fit

the usual description of a heroine doomed to be in love and then refused. In

view of Catherine’s lack, James thought that the location of Washington

Square would provide to produce in the tale that missing “scenic” element.

The author used the specificity of the place to fill the gap created by the

protagonist’s tenuous vividness. James’s distinctive trait is that he chose to

not describe the setting of New York evoking its noises, murmurs and

chaos, as his predecessors Balzac and Dickens would have done.

16 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 211.

31

James learned what “to be scenic” meant when he gave an account of

the concept in his autobiography A Small Boy and Others, talking about

when his spoiled cousin Marie refused to go to bed.

«“Come now, my dear; don’t make a scene – I insist on your not making a scene!”

That was all the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the less epoch-

making. The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I had never heard – it had

never been addressed to us at home; and who should say now what a world one

mightn’t at once read into it? It seemed freighted to sail so far; it told me so much about

life. Life at these intensities clearly became “scenes”; but the great thing, the immense

illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose.”»17

Catherine chooses to not sulk when her father opposes his will to hers,

she chooses to not be “scenic”, and her choice disappoints Aunt Penniman,

widow who uses her scenic abilities all the time.

Catherine is not an interesting person for the characters around her and

she is not even an interesting character for the reader, at least not at the

beginning. She becomes interesting because James made her so, because he

gave her relevance and he showed to care about her own story and personal

growth. It was a way to make heroes and heroines compelling, even though

their roles were played by characters who were not smart, fascinating or

perceptive, but who still strove and kept existing in the world.

James was interested in humanity in general, but women could draw

more his attention than men did. Probably, it was because of the situation in

which women lived during his time, how they were trapped from many

points of view:

17 H. James, A Small Boy and Others, New York, Wilson Press, 2007, p. 89.

32

«By their filial and financial dependency, by the expectation that they would marry

and the hope that they would marry well, by the cleverer and more subvert strategies

required of them if they were to get whatever it was they wanted.»18

James felt a sentiment of sympathy towards them and their arduous

circumstances and, at the same time, he admired them for their manners

and how they survived in society. Catherine does not have the qualities that

James presumably admired in women, but he did admire the way she keeps

fighting for what she believes in, so that the soft tones of her voice and her

powerful silence are heard by the people who surround her.

Aunt Penniman, the other female character of the novel, is a well-

written and fully developed character from every possible standpoint. She

is not treated by James as a minor character. On the contrary, if another

parallel novel existed in which Aunt Penniman was its protagonist, she

would not be less than who she is in the original Washington Square. She

starts and she remains until the very end of the novel an egotistical,

delusional and meddlesome woman.

James’s men do not conduct the same struggle that women do, quite the

opposite, they are the planets around which the satellites-women revolve.

Morris and Doctor Sloper are not doubtful about their roles: Morris must

try to marry Catherine in order to obtain her money and Doctor Sloper must

dismantle his plan. They do not exist to help or support Catherine, but just

to make her choices harder and to prevent her from being autonomous and

think with her own mind.

The doctor spares his daughter misery, but, in doing so, he keeps her far

from happiness as well, not comprehending that maybe the two are

complementary to each other. It is true that Doctor Sloper knew misery

thanks to Catherine, for her birth was the main cause of his wife’s death,

18 M. Cunningham, Afterword in Henry James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 218.

33

but he could have also tried to seek for happiness accepting his daughter.

Catherine is no comparison to her mother’s likeability and intelligence, and

yet, rejecting her for who she is, the doctor outsmarts himself, becoming

his own enemy.

The doctor fails in what Henry James could do so well: the author

could study the details and analyze the behaviors so to notice and

appreciate what is extraordinary in normal people that day by day live their

lives, without acts of grandeur but with humility. Doctor Sloper, who was

unable to truly see Catherine and to recognize her value, at the end of the

novel is punished through his inability to see her daughter becoming a

woman worth of social respect and attention.

If money is the reason why bonds between people exist, money is also

the cause that separates them. Its relevance is so great that when Catherine

proposes Morris to live with less money, she is nearly considered insane.

James showed that even people who have enough money do not have

happiness in return or live a less troubled life.

One of Henry James’s amazing abilities as a writer was his genius in

considering a character’s normal life interesting. He was able to find in it,

even if poor of resounding events, detailed analyses about human’s nature.

The only thing that he seemed to require was a great quantity of patience,

for the more the lives he observed moved slowly, the easier it was for him

to attentively study them.

James helped the novel as a literary genre move forward, for he did not

offer the reader some right model of behavior to diligently follow, but he

just offered windows on others’ lives. James did not try to instruct the

reader, but he only gave him/her an opportunity to immerse himself/herself

in the characters’ own point of view. Even though there is a remarkable

distance between James’s way of writing and that of Modernists, like

34

Woolf and Joyce, nevertheless he was their precursor and was a pioneer of

the stream of consciousness.

To try to fully understand and know the characters of Washington

Square, the reader has to follow their stories. It is essential for the reader to

interpret, observe and be empathetic with the characters during those crises

that change them and make them more mature, but it is also significant to

stay with them during their “after-effect”. It is not a case that the novel did

not end even with the death of its co-protagonist, Doctor Sloper.

Naturalness and Cleverness

The word “natural” is used especially from Catherine’s point of view

and it is attributed to Morris: it is the way in which she sees him, until he

even defines himself “natural”. In the sixth chapter, Morris also refers to

her employing the same adjective, but Catherine’s naturalness is evidently

different from her suitor’s. “ “That’s what I like you for; you are so natural.

Excuse me,” he added, “you see I am natural myself.” ”19

The protagonist, opposed to Doctor Sloper and Morris’s personalities,

is different because she is naturally good and even innocent. Unlike the two

male characters, Catherine does not exploit her intelligence for her personal

purposes, regardless of the damages it can bring to the people around her.

What her father and Morris use to achieve their goals is cleverness and

this element is in contrast with Catherine’s naturalness. She does not think

in utilitarian terms, for she incarnates “the romantic idea of Nature”20, an

idea pre-existent the concept of “cleverness” and not yet corrupted by it.

But Catherine’s being not clever does not imply that she is stupid, as all

the other characters erroneously think. Not possessing that ability means

19 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 32. 20 M. Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 66.

35

that she is not capable of speaking the false, on the contrary, she is even too

honest and, subsequently, too natural.

She is so natural that when things start changing and she starts

answering indirectly to Doctor Sloper, the reader does not blame her for

doing it, after all that her father have put her through. On the contrary, the

narrator ironically evidences it, even counting the first times in which

Catherine does not speak directly the truth. In doing so, the narrator teases

the reader to notice this slow development in the heroine’s mind and how

she is learning to play the same game all the characters play for the entire

length of the novel.

During the novel, the reader has to understand if Morris is sincere or

not, and that task is taken by Doctor Sloper who goes to Mrs.

Montgomery’s house to discover the truth about her brother. Thus, the

doctor uncovers the reality he was expecting, but when he discusses his

thoughts with his intelligent sister, Elizabeth, she tries to make him see the

situation from another perspective.

«I don’t see why you should be incredulous. […] It seems to me that you have

never done Catherine justice. You must remember that she has the prospect of thirty

thousand a year. […] I don’t mean that is her only merit; I simply mean that is a great

one. A great many young men think so; and you appear to me never to have been

properly aware of that. You have always had a little way of alluding to her as an

unmarriageable girl.»21

Aunt Almond wants his brother to accept that Catherine can be a

marriageable girl, even though her money is part of what makes her

“attractive” to other men. It seems like she tries to remind him how he

himself got married, not just falling in love with “the most charming eyes

in the island of Manhattan”22, but also considering the financial situation of

his deceased wife. Doctor Sloper acts as if he deliberately forgets about it, 21 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, pp. 35-36. 22 Ibid., p. 3.

36

nearly trying to deny the fact that another man can be as clever as he was in

his youth.

The conversation goes on and Aunt Almond keeps supporting her

theory, underscoring how Morris surpassed that early phase in life in which

a man contemplates to marry an attractive and energetic girl. She

comprehends how Morris, being now in a more mature phase, also takes

into consideration other factors and how he follows “the sincerity of

calculation”23, the same doctrine Doctor Sloper follows, after all.

Arthur, Morris’s cousin, early in the novel, talking to Catherine, refers

to his cousin addressing him as “too clever”24 and the protagonist does not

see it as a merit, a quality, but she has “a feeling that if Morris Townsend

had a fault it would naturally be that one”. 25 Even Catherine,

unconsciously, partially understands Morris’s true nature.

Like Morris, Doctor Sloper is too clever as well. Too clever because his

excessive cleverness is what brings ruin to him, as he thinks he is capable

to know everything about anyone. The doctor is convinced that a single

glance is enough for him to study a person or a situation and to have it

under control. After forgetting how he found himself in the same

circumstances Morris is, he also seems to forget that he already

experimented the negative effects of his exaggerated self-confidence,

losing his child and his wife.

He eventually loses his daughter too, even if in a different way, because

instead of showing his fatherly love (that he seems to have lost with the

death of his first child), he treats Catherine as a curious experiment, using

his mind, and so his cleverness, and not his heart.

23 M. Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 67. 24 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 27. 25 Ibid.

37

He seems to not be able to show Catherine any kind of fondness,

because his daughter proves herself dull, plain and boring, she cannot give

him any surprises. This is, at least, what he initially thinks, but Catherine is

actually able to offer him the unexpected and the doctor does not like it, he

does not like what goes against his predictions. The doctor’s intelligence

wanted a light resistance that could make the situation interesting, but when

he receives it, when his daughter decides where to lead her own destiny, he

prevents her from doing it on her own terms.

Doctor Sloper, as reader or spectator of the story, supposes and fosters

an end to the events that Millicent Bell defines “aesthetic”. His view is

traditional, for he prefers an ending that declares him the winner and where

his previsions become reality. But, if he can actually foresee what Morris’s

intentions really are, on the other hand, he cannot anticipate his daughter’s

actions and cannot guess her thoughts and feelings.

Washington Square, with its plot and characters, would have normally

been a novel with an easily predictable conclusion and with no plot twists.

But James managed to astonish not only the reader, but his most clever

character, reminding him how life is unpredictable and that he should have

learned something from it, for he already suffered earlier in his life.

Catherine and Her Quest for Freedom

In James’s work, the characters try to interpret the other characters’

intentions and actions, but they plainly obtain always the same thing:

failure. Doctor Sloper fails to understand what is really going on in

Catherine’s mind, as she fails to understand Morris’s true intents and as

Aunt Penniman seems to keep missing the seriousness of the entire

situation. It is interesting to notice how there is constantly the presence of a

prominent instability inside James’s characters’ minds.

38

Characters can never truly understand each other or themselves, they

are not able to find a shared agreement, for they cannot gather the actual

sense of the others’ silences and impetuses. James’s characters are

paralyzed, they are not able to communicate with each other and it also

happens because in such a dangerous and uncertain environment like

American society, they do not have a single belief, ideal or moral to which

they can hold onto once and for all, feeling safe.

Concepts like “meaning” or “identity” are incessantly elusive and

fleeing in James and his characters try to rely on social conventions,

structures and rules, searching for a common ground, but they just keep

discovering obscure truths, repressed feelings and unresolved conflicts.

At the inception of Washington Square, Catherine lets the other

characters around her take the reins of her life, first and foremost Doctor

Sloper, secondarily Morris and Aunt Penniman. She almost seems unaware

of what freedom is, that her life does only belong to her and that she has

power over it. As the story progresses, she slowly develops her own

identity and resolves to make her own choices, even if they go against the

other characters’ desires. Her silences start to signify that she listens to her

inner voice at last, they are not the symbol of her submission and

embarrassment anymore.

The protagonist, seeking liberty, has to let go of her past ideas, based

on her father’s authority, a man that she thought infallible. The social and

familiar hierarchy that sees him on the top and that was Catherine’s point

of reference falls down in front of her, leaving her without any other

certainty and eager to find a new person she can count on: Morris.

Catherine undertakes this fight to reach her own freedom and

happiness, to find a meaning in her own life. In attempting to do so, she

needs to stop from being subject to the others’ will and from being led

where the others want her to be. She can give a meaning to her life only

39

being unrestrained from the other characters’ manipulations and from the

established social restrictions imposed on her.

When Catherine battles for her own independence, she is not able to

look back at her past anymore, to her old self, to her misconceptions

concerning Doctor Sloper, Morris and Aunt Penniman, all people that she

sincerely believed acted for her sake.

The naked truth is that she was victim of the other people’s decisions

and that she will remain a victim until that day she dies. She does not live

the life she wanted and chose for herself, for she remains trapped in a web

made of constraints, fears and deceptions. Catherine is admired by the

reader because she decisively wants her voice to be heard and tries to adapt

herself to the complicated situations around her.

The Fifth Kind of Will

The word “clever” is never associated to Catherine, while, on the

contrary, it perfectly describes characters like Doctor Sloper or Morris,

subtle manipulators. To make interesting a story that has as its protagonist a

character like Catherine, a dull and common-place girl, it was not an easy

task for James to undertake. One of the features he used referring to

Catherine was to list all the qualities that she did not possess and all the

kinds of personality she did not embody.

«She was not ugly […] Catherine was decidedly not clever; she was not quick with

her book, nor, indeed, with anything else. She was not abnormally deficient, and she

mustered learning enough to acquit herself respectably in conversation with her

contemporaries […] had no desire to shine.»26

It is not simple for a reader to notice such a great number of negations,

but eventually James managed to create a character with a strong will out

26 Ibid., pp. 8-9.

40

of an individual who, with all those negations, nearly seemed a passive

shadow.

Catherine is at the center of a conflict that involves many other

characters around her, but she also lives a conflict in her own mind,

something that is even more problematic to handle for her. However, it is

pointless how hard the other characters try to manipulate her, she is not a

victim. She refuses to be incarcerated by the others’ expectations and roles

they want her to play: the female protagonist, with perseverance and

determination, asserts her reasons and her point of view.

Doctor Sloper’s daughter shows him and the others strengths they were

never able to actually value. Aunt Penniman affirms that Catherine is

“true” and “steadfast”27 and the doctor himself notices her “unaggressive

obstinacy” 28 . If initially Catherine is unable to even protect her own

interests because of her “excessive goodness”, going on she is capable of

seeing how the other characters do not really care about damaging her, as

long as it gives them the possibility to reach their purposes.

Another of Catherine’s strengths is her silence, an element that

normally would communicate submission and blinded acceptance, but that

James converted into a positive force that makes the main character unique.

If the doctor, Aunt Penniman and Morris all indirectly agree on following

the rules of publicly expressing themselves with feigned manners and

speeches, Catherine does not deceive herself and the others with histrionic

behaviors and discourses.

When the story begins, Catherine does not even seem to have a will, for

it is bent to her father’s and to the desire of pleasing him. Later on her will

starts developing and she feels guilty for going against Doctor Sloper’s

wishes, behaving as a bad daughter according to her conscience. Near the

27 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 92. 28 Ibid., p. 130.

41

end, she continues to defy him and manages to refuse to fulfill the doctor’s

will of never marrying Morris, despite her father is on his deathbed.

At the conclusion of the novel, Catherine opts for remaining an old

maid, opposing herself to the conventions of her time, society and class.

She refuses to spend her life dedicating herself to marriage and

motherhood, remaining an independent, respectable and wealthy woman.

Of course, in this way she is not able to know and enjoy the pleasures of

having a family of her own, nonetheless she keeps living her days in a

dignified loneliness.

Even though Catherine’s rest of her days is grey and melancholic, her

life is defined by her own choice at the closure of the story. And, again,

even though her conventional ideal of happiness was to marry her

handsome lover, the way in which she remains faithful to her own desire

makes her the personification of the American love for freedom.

In his studies, William James delineates five kinds of will that it seems

his younger brother bore in mind writing Washington Square and

portraying its characters.

Doctor Sloper well represents the first will, “the reasonable type”29, the

person who uses rationality and imposes his authority on the others to make

them believe what is most convenient for his own interests. He never

questions his own methods and convictions, besides he is praised and

feared since he never stops until he obtains what he wants.

Secondarily, Morris embodies “the obstructed will” and “the explosive

will”. 30 Concerning the latter, Morris has a spirited and impudent

personality that pushes him to act impulsively. If he has a desire, even

temporary, he will do anything to fulfill it anyway, acting fast rather than

thinking about its consequences. About the other kind of will, he never

29 M. Banta, Introduction in Henry James, Washington Square, London, Penguin Books, 2007, p. xxiv. 30 Ibid.

42

dictate his own terms to the others, contrarily to what the first kind of will

does.

Masculine presences dominate Catherine’s life, regardless of what kind

of will they portray, and yet she survives and has the energy to become the

mistress in Washington Square. William James explained how a will

surrounded by other sturdy wills, resisting them, it is made powerful by

their existence. The last kind of will, “the resistant will”,31 mixed with the

element of the “habit”, is the one which overcomes difficulties and this is

why Catherine gains her own strength from defeating the tough and

persistent wills of her father and Morris.

Habit is what permits Catherine to go on with her life, despite the

storms she has to weather. Habit is the factor that gives her balance when

she cannot decide between her father and her suitor, what helps her to

survive the emotional emptiness she perceives in the mature stage of her

existence. Day after day, year after year her life is not altered, but this

repetition reinforces her, as she is ultimately portrayed sat and focused on

her fancywork, nearly condemned to work on it even after the end of her

lifetime.

The final will that shapes Catherine into a new person has its roots in

another will. When the story starts, she succumbs to her father’s demands,

but the situation changes as she meets Morris. She starts living in an

alternative way, for an external presence comes into her life and she

undergoes an inner evolution. It brings her new needs and new

expectations, as if she spent her life in a reverie until she met Morris. Her

meeting with the young man symbolizes the moment of her awakening and

the phase in which this fourth will causes significant transformations in her

and her everyday life.

31 Ibid, p. xxvi.

43

When Henry James had to explain what separates “the romantic” from

“the real”, he underscored how the former is associated with dangerous

happenings and a life full of risks. Though he emphasized that dangers and

the unknown are daily present, even in a normal and ordinary existence like

Catherine’s.

Doctor Sloper and Morris are different under many aspects, but they

rely on the scientific rules of reason and on what can be demonstrated by

facts. They believe they know everything and that this makes them both

realists. But it is on this point that they are mistaken, for they are subjects

of “romance” as much as Aunt Penniman is.

«The romantic stands, on the other hand, for the things that, with all the facilities in

the world, all the wealth, and all the courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we

never can directly know; the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit

and subterfuge of our thought and our desire.»32

In opposition to them, Catherine stands as the only genuine realist in

the novel. She is the only one who actually tries to investigate her deepest

thoughts and emotional conflicts, that is “the unknown”, and to understand

how to deal with it, searching for a compromise.

Her desire to find a communal agreement with the opposing characters

and to try to not feed resentful feelings show how good-natured she

actually is. When the doctor is dying and asks Catherine to keep a promise,

that is the only moment in which she retaliates for everything that her

father submitted her to. Catherine’s revenge is to not give her father

information on what he wants to know the most; that same man that

thought of knowing everything and everyone from the beginning to the end

of the novel.

32 H. James, The Novels and Tales of Henry James; New York Edition; Volume II; The American, Victoria, Leopold Publishing, 2016.

44

Morris’s Social Freedom

The character of Morris Townsend has been often criticized, as he has

been seen as the same old handsome fortune-hunter who makes his

appearance in so many novels. His importance and the fact that he has been

perfectly positioned in the social and historical context of the novel have

been rarely stressed.

Similarities between Doctor Sloper and Morris are easy to detect. They

both look at Catherine not seeing her simply as a person, but as heiress of a

fortune. At the engagement party, the doctor tells her: “You look as if you

had eighty thousand a year.”33 Moreover, the both see the world like an

enormous market where people are nothing else but products that can be

purchased for a fair price. Morris is envious of what Doctor Sloper has and

the doctor can easily understand what Morris wants: it is because they both

share the same middle-class beliefs.

But, unlike the doctor, Morris has a certain “naturalness” that even

Catherine notes in him. They both possess some kind of social

awkwardness, but if Morris shows it in his loquacious discourses, in the

opposite manner Catherine has it in her silence. Even if it is undeniable that

Morris’s naturalness is part of his artificial ways of behaving, it also

represents the impossibility to define and classify him in one of the Doctor

Sloper’s fixed social categories, for Morris has no business in New York.

This is the reason why “he was a great stranger in New York”34 and also

why to Catherine “He’s more like a foreigner.”35

Not having a job, Morris is in an indefinite situation that gives him a

problematic and strange kind of “freedom”, according to Doctor Sloper’s

opinion. It does not exist an expression to define what and who he

represents in the society, thus there is no place for him in Washington

33 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 21. 34 Ibid., p. 18. 35 Ibid., p. 26.

45

Square. What Morris really threatens is not so much Catherine’s

inheritance nor Doctor Sloper’s role and position, but society in its

wholeness. He unconsciously reveals the uselessness of social boundaries

and classes, since he can surpass them without being trapped by any

hierarchical restriction.

Morris’s cousin, Arthur Townsend, when he has to decide where he

wants to go to live with Marian Almond, Catherine’s cousin, he talks about

moving to the northern part of New York. This side of the city is the most

chaotic one, where the effects of energy of the industrialization and of the

overcrowding are more present and visible.

On the opposite side there is Washington Square, the bastion that

embodies the desire of those people that do not want to move north. It is

the ideal place for who seeks calmness and quietness in the general

agitation that dwells in the flourishing city of New York. Doctor Sloper

contemplates and then actualizes his idea to live in this precise area, so to

have the chance to practice his profession, benefit from his prestige and

lead a financially secure life.

Morris has not both the need and the possibility to move northward, so

he finds himself content to think of his future in Washington Square,

finding peace and stability among its walls, taking the place of Doctor

Sloper as master of the house and beneficiary of Catherine’s fortune.

The job that Morris acquires at the end of the novel excellently

represents the perpetual social changes and the progress of the emerging

classes in the new American landscape. His employment is “to mediate

between manufacturers and the selling of their products in foreign

markets”.36

James noticed that employments like Morris’s, that seems so

unpractical and detached from any kind of dependency, were the ones to

36 I. F. A. Bell, Henry James: Fiction as History, London, Barnes & Noble Books, 1985, p. 38.

46

distinguish the new American industrial society. Morris’s profession is

distant from the process of production itself and, contrary to it, he works in

a world wholly made of paper. The fragility of his world is connected to the

fragility of the concept of money, more abstract than ever during the

author’s lifetime.

American Society

Many critics focused on the Henry James’s adherence to the principles

of the philosophy of Emerson, a great influence for the writer and his

father. The thing is that both Henry Jameses never completely approved the

futurity of Emerson’s thought and its way of going beyond social laws,

neglectful of the present. Father and son, on the contrary, believed more in

the flawed individual and in his/her own fallibility, his/her capability of

accepting errors and of overcoming the fake certainties of the self.

The fallibility of the individual is a concept that involves the

acknowledgment of the fact that a person can never know everything

already, or there would not be any point in the discovery and in the

continuing research in life. This is the only way in which an individual and

his/her knowledge can grow and become mature, moreover the notion of

fallibility was an essential phase in the epistemological process for Henry

James Senior and his son.

James’s being American does not focus on history or politics as much

as he focuses on the self, almost trying to find shelter from the difficulties

of the society and its institutions. And that need for seclusion also came

from the weight of the role that Henry James Senior played in society. It is

not a coincidence that many of his son’s works lack a precise and a well-

defined historical context and critics often reprimanded James for that.

47

With his paternal authority, James Senior has always been an inhibitive

presence for his children. William and Henry Junior felt it during their

lives; Alice gave an account of it in her diary, describing how there was not

any space for her in a family dominated by male authority; the other two

children, Wilkie and Roberson, never really had a drop of attention from

their father, as they were just a disappointment to him.

Habegger points out how James’s need for escaping family and the

surrounding society was born from his father’s failure to impress him “any

sense of masculine identity or role”37. The novelist never actually learned

how boys communicated among them, their language or behavior, and it

caused in him the painful feeling of never being a true man.

Poirier, talking about a tradition of American writers, demonstrates that

in a society where people felt trapped and where everything seemed

hopeless, the only escape route that the writer had was to defy and change

the language through innovations.

In this and other works, James depicted his view of modern societies

and how they had a certain characterization that lied upon the fragment of

history in which they were situated. James’s description of modern

societies was pretty unemotional, underlining how the individuals who

lived in them had to, sooner or later, face and, in some cases, also

acknowledge their own fragility.

James saw what changes took place in his time and described the

tragedy of human beings that were forced to adapt themselves to new ways

of living and of relating themselves with the others.

«A new way of making and accumulating money, a dizzying new form of social

mobility tied to this new economy, a new culture obsessively dedicated to work and

financial success, consumerism, a cult of celebrity and fame, a mass culture based on

journalism and advertising, a new conception of individuals as untrustworthy centers of

37 A. Taylor, Henry James and the Father Question, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 12.

48

self-interest, a new sort of dependence on the views of others for social esteem, and

many others factors mean that things have not simply changed, they have changed in an

unprecedented way.»38

That new modern context had no space for genuine interest, honesty,

social understanding, reliability and emotional insight. Quite the contrary,

it encouraged people to judge others, to be hypocritical, to be cold-hearted

and to focus only on themselves.

James identified those new modern societies as a first step towards a

mass failure and what he questioned himself about in his works was how

people would have responded to that big change, how they would have kept

their humanness in such inhuman surroundings.

James represented a context in which people had to deal with a

situation of instability. This caused the spread of issues and fears among

people, such as anxiety, pretense and the feeling of being out of place.

They were all ways in which people tried to react to modernity, where a

new kind of sociality led them to doubt, paranoia, despair and even to

actual pathology.

The problem was that people did not understand the society they were

living in. When they had to deal with it, they preferred a static situation to a

changing one, for mutability meant risk, disappointment and unhappiness.

That is exactly how Catherine unfortunately ends up at the end of the

novel: she decides to live her life alone and in the same house her father

lived in.

Unfortunately, in this new modern society people had to accept to be in

contact with others every day, but these relationships were built on social

and economic interests, leaving out feelings and concerns. People became

nothing else that a small part in a big mechanism, where they eventually

had to let go of their subjectivity and humanity.

38 R. B. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 57.

49

It comes a moment in which these relationships undermine people’s

lives, taking away from them even their own meaning. When this happens,

when one’s life depends on such intrusive and inhibiting connections, then

freedom itself is lost, and identity with it.

The other side of the coin is that people will always need to build

relationships with other people, so, in order to completely obtain freedom,

they will need to be recognized by the others. In such modern societies,

people need, more than ever, to exchange opinions and to be perceived as

individuals by other subjects that are their equals.

In this kind of societies, another step towards freedom is made only if

one possesses enough capital. James knew it well and, even if it may seem

an unromantic solution, it actually is the starting point that leads to

freedom. The problem is that it does not matter if money is not earned,

acquired through marriage or inherited, it will always bring desire of power

over others and create dependency.

The method James used to demonstrate what his characters lost in their

battle against society was to display their dependence on others, their need

to experience an acknowledgment given by a person equal to them.

Catherine needs to be recognized by her father and by Morris; the doctor

needs to be recognized by society and by everyone else around him; Aunt

Penniman needs to be recognized by the protagonists of her personal

melodrama.

James wanted to prove the fallibility of that American desire for

searching some kind of presumed independence and self-reliance, when, in

truth, the stress was put on the centrality of social esteem and of being seen

more than actually seeing. Even if Catherine succeeds in conquering

independence, it is not of the romantic or heroic kind. Her independence

comes at a price and with her refusing to come to terms with untrue

alternatives.

50

In James’s work, morality, represented within that new social

modernity and its historical context, is not something that his characters try

to attain, struggling to be good or to commit to their duties, but rather their

determination to simply live their lives, as Catherine does, or at least tries

to do.

James was always interested in how power worked and in what aspects

it could appear, especially regarding the power deriving from social

classes.

America vs Europe

James’s work is set in a pre-Civil War New York, between 1830s and

1840s when the novel starts and during the 1850s at its end. Contrarily to

what James normally did, he decided to set the story in a period of time

previous to the one in which the story was written and published. The

environment was very familiar to him, for Washington Square was the

place in which he was born and grew up. James resolved to not write the

novel from the standpoint of a New Yorker, but he did write it while living

in Paris. In this manner it can be noticed that he chose to write Washington

Square, an American book, deliberately from a distance.

Even if the title “Washington Square” seems to be out of place or out of

context, as the critics noticed when James published his work, because it

cannot be categorized as a historical novel, James’s choice of the title is

actually accurate. Surely, it does not give the reader a general picture on the

situation that develops within the novel, the conflict between Catherine and

Doctor Sloper, and it also does not specifically refers to the house in which

the central part of the story takes place, but rather to the public space that is

in front of it. And yet the square is a prolongation of the house itself, and

this is, in turn, a symbol and a building closely connected to the

51

protagonist. Additionally, the range of Washington Square can be extended

so much to include the city of New York and finally even the American

country in its entirety.

Like his colleague and fellow countryman Nathaniel Hawthorne,

James, in his book Hawthorne, looked at America, compared to the

European continent, and saw how little it could offer him to his

imagination. That is the reason why, as an expatriate, he found shelter and

home far from his native land. On the other hand, if his physical self could

stay away from his motherland, his mind could not, for in 1880 he created

“his most American fiction”39 taking refuge in the French capital from the

harshness of that winter.

The novel also illustrates the ‘Old New York’, a kind of society that

started undergoing serious changes by the early 1880s, and of which

Doctor Sloper is a resolute exponent.

When James set foot again in the United States in the early 1900s, he

returned to the neighborhood of his childhood just to discover that almost

everything that he knew has departed. The confusion created by the arrival

of commercialization, immigration and industrialization has taken the old

houses and the social circles of Washington Square away. James, viewed

New York from an external point of view, as the American expatriate he

was, barely recognizing his native city; on the other hand, he did not lose

the internal point of view of the American who lived there for many years

and could notice the social, economical, political changes that had taken

place in New York.

Having spent several years in Europe, a continent that preserved the

history of many ethnic groups, James’s sentiment of “Americanness” did

not include a narrow and exclusive opinion of his own national identity as

something fixed and closed; but he did know that to be American meant to

39 C. Ozick, James as Jilter: Absenteeism in Washington Square in The American Scholar, The Phi Beta Kappa Society, Autumn 2002, p. 54.

52

be a subject coming from a mixture of different cultures and to be open in

accepting diversity.

This sentiment is called “modern cosmopolitanism” 40 and it is

addressed to Henry James by John Carlos Rowe. The latter explains how

James was interested in other cultures and tried to incorporate them into his

own work or life every time that he had the chance. James’s

cosmopolitanism assumed the idea of cultural subjectivity that included

two crucial concepts: the concept of the culture to which one belongs and

the concept of the “culture of the other”.

This is the reason why James thought “Americanness” was not some

kind of “essence” possessed by every American citizen, but rather a pretty

ambiguous and fleeing feature. In James’s opinion this feature involved the

awareness that Americans came from a mixture and that it made it

impossible to distinguish between various cultures and communities within

American society.

A curious image presents itself in a passage at the beginning of the

tenth chapter, when Catherine receives Morris in her drawing room and

where a “narrow mirror” reflects two volumes, entitled History of England.

This detail gives no further information directly concerning the events of

the story, so it distances itself from novelistic expression; on the other

hand, it also has no moral function, as it could have had in Hawthorne. It is

just a simple adornment, but with another purpose, a kind of strange

remainder, because as the novel is about the American past, the latter

originates from that of England. It is England which “lends” the novel

some of its features, even though James considered Washington Square as

an American tale.

40 M. H. Ross, G. W. Zacharias, Tracing Henry James, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, p. 261.

53

Style and Genre

The title of the novel seemed to propose a historic topic, maybe James’s

own reconstruction of the neighborhood of his childhood, with traces of

melancholy and nostalgia, but if critics were expecting a work of that kind,

they were all disappointed.

The atmosphere of New York that James evoked in his work was more

similar to the one belonging to fairy-tales than to historical novels. The

structure seemed to confirm it, for Catherine could recall the orphaned

princess, Doctor Sloper as the pitiless king, Morris as the prince charming

and Aunt Penniman as the interfering stepmother.

The narrator expresses a feeling of nostalgia that can be noted in the

third chapter of the book. This surfaces when he seems lost in his own

thoughts, remembering a New York of “forty years ago”41, the period of

James’s childhood.

From the fourth chapter on, time and space seem to disappear and the

Square, the perfect place for “The ideal of quiet and genteel retirement”42,

is surrounded by an atmosphere of timelessness, unlike the chaotic and

more commercial Lower Manhattan.

When James wrote Washington Square, he did not exactly know what

model to use. He was undecided between the Realism adopted by one of

the greatest James’s masters and influences, Balzac, and the Romanticism

of his compatriot, Hawthorne. Eventually, he resolved to find a

compromise between them and to make them work together in Washington

Square.

«One of the main complications of the novel is Catherine’s quietude. Her rare-

spokenness and broken syntax articulate both the object of James’s disquiet (by its

paralysed, non-dialogical incapacity) and the putative alternative to it (as an

41 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 13. 42 Ibid.

54

increasingly impossible gesture towards authenticity and a freedom from lexical and

institutional impositions). It is thus simultaneously frozen in the material world that we

experience (as a reminder of the unchangeability of commodities, their denial of their

own production) and a resistance against such materiality (as a Romantic refusal of

discourse to taint itself by a world already given). […] In other words, the situation of

Catherine may be read as an index to James’s negotiation of Balzac and Hawthorne, and

his interest in the urge, encouraged by novelistic convention, to locate the alternative

worlds of fiction within the world we ordinarily experience.»43

James does not want to take liberty away from his readers and, in order

to obtain it, he shows them only a possible vision of the object and never

the object of his vision straightforwardly. This allows his readers to

interpret his work in different ways and to keep their freedom. “Liberty in

style and in behaviour are thus equally guaranteed by obliquity of angle”44,

a lesson that James had learned from Hawthorne.

The same debate, but from the economic point of view, took place

during the 1830s (the period in which Doctor Sloper changed his residence

to Washington Square): the money issue between paper and coin. The

problem presented the same query that James was trying to resolve, the one

between the rhetoric of imagination and that of realism. In his readings of

Balzac and Hawthorne, James was exploring possibilities about the

materiality of writing itself.

The money discussion gave James the pretext to reflect on the question

between the substantial and the abstract aspect of his profession. In

Washington Square, he illustrated how the conceptual elements had the

same weight and relevance of the concrete ones, influencing people’s

attitude, social structures and the historical development of events. And it

was pretty visible in the America at that time since the practices of the

43 I. F. A. Bell, Henry James: Fiction as History, London, Barnes &Noble Books, 1985, pp. 12-13. 44 Ibid., p. 14.

55

spreading industries affected minds and bodies of groups of people,

bringing damage to them.

James’s ironic touch is palpable and is all over the novel, making it

similar to a tragicomedy. This is achieved especially thanks to Doctor

Sloper’s presence, always ready to cruelly make fun of the people around

him and to sarcastically comment on their situations. It is not so difficult to

recognize some of the author’s points of view so close to the doctor’s ones:

“The doctor’s categorizing instinct and sense of probabilities are very much

that of the novelist who admired Balzac.”45 The doctor’s irony, used by the

narrator as well, is turned against Austin Sloper himself, so to suggest that

sarcasm is not the answer to everything and that to be blind to someone’s

feelings does not represent a way to solve problems.

Throughout the novel there is a change in the narrator’s ideas and in his

way to look at the events that take place. He seems to become more

understanding towards Catherine’s unfortunate situation and shows

empathy for his anti-heroine. It can be observed how the narrator’s tones,

going forward in the novel, grows more serious and less ironic towards the

protagonist and the reason is that he ends up considering her with respect,

for her love is pure and honest and deserves his admiration.

The narrator intervenes in the novel, showing to know more than the

characters do and almost anticipating relevant information, but then he

withdraws, as if he remembers that he is revealing too much and should

only tell the story as it is, omitting the knowledge he has on the entire

situation.

«She grew up a very robust and healthy child, and her father, as he looked at her,

often said to himself that, such as she was, he at least need have no fear of losing her. I

45 M. Bell, Style as Subject “Washington Square” in The Sewanee Review, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Winter 1975, p. 32.

56

say “such as she was,” because, to tell the truth– But this is a truth of which I will defer

the telling.»46

The narrator offers us even insights on the main characters, but, as the

story proceeds, he steps back and distances himself from Doctor Sloper,

stopping himself from acting like someone who possesses all the wisdom

of the world.

The novel has the pattern, traits and characters of a melodrama: the rich

heiress, the charming but manipulative fortune-hunter, the authoritarian

father determined to prevent their engagement and the intrusive and over-

imaginative aunt in the role of the young niece’s confidant.

The characters’ melodramatic elements are noticeable. Catherine plays

the part of the dull girl, too good, too honest, but she does not receive

goodness and honesty in return from the people around her. She finds

herself at the center of the intrigues that the other characters have plotted

around her life, suffocating her and depriving her of having a choice of her

own.

When James was writing Washington Square, he probably kept in mind

Balzac’s example, for he was the most important influence to him. More

specifically, James’s novel is similar to Eugénie Grandet in certain aspects.

For example, Felix, Eugénie’s father, has gained wealth coming from a

worse social condition, like Doctor Sloper. Charles, Felix’s nephew, wants

to marry Eugénie and, like Morris, he is an indolent young man. Initially,

Felix does not approve the engagement between his daughter and Charles,

but, unlike Doctor Sloper, he finally accepts it. Unfortunately, Eugénie

suffers abandonment and disappointment when Charles leaves her, after

she gave him her fortune. But if in James’s novel, Catherine chooses to

reject Morris, in Balzac, Eugénie is jilted by Charles, because he decides to

marry another woman. 46 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 4.

57

Furthermore, the principal characters of the novel and, more

particularly, the trio composed by the figures of the rationalist doctor, his

good-hearted daughter and the fascinating but perfidious suitor seems to

recall the same protagonists in the short story written by Hawthorne,

Rappaccini’s Daughter. The framework of the story is also rather similar to

that of Washington Square, as the female character’s destiny is too

arrogantly determined by the two male forces that compete with each other

to gain power over her life and decisions. Assuredly, James’s novel is

different from Hawthorne’s short story, but James could have been taken

Hawthorne’s work as an initial point of reference.

Doctor Sloper is ironic, he is always ready to answer back his

interlocutor with calculated wordplays or logical reflections. There are

times in which his rationality becomes cold-heartedness and even pure and

groundless cruelty.

Morris is compared by Catherine to a young man “in a novel, or, better

still, in a play, on the stage, close before the footlights, looking at the

audience, and with everyone looking at him”47, but the unlucky girl cannot

gather that Mr. Townsend was pretending right in front of her as well.

Aunt Penniman tries to play the role of the love moderator between the

two parts, but she usually plans things so that her “mock romanticism”48

can be satisfied, without giving actual help to the couple.

Even if Aunt Penniman is the character most easily associable with the

melodramatic tones of the novel and often reproached by her brother

because of it, the cold and tyrannical Doctor Sloper is not completely

immune to its contagion. When Catherine informs him that she does not

want to give Morris up, he reacts threatening her to wait until his death. As

the eighteen chapters comes to an end, he also reprimands her, calling her

“an ungrateful, cruel child” that gives her father “the greatest pain of his

47 Ibid., p. 14. 48 Ibid., p. 44.

58

life”49. This passage splendidly demonstrates the pure melodramatic tone of

Doctor Sloper’s assertion.

The elements of melancholia and mourning characterize the

melodramatic genre and they are both present in Washington Square. Even

though melodrama is not considered as majestic as tragedy, it surely is a

genre that debates everyday matters, but it does not mean they are

irrelevant. In James’s novel such themes are physical and mental

submission, the power of influence, freedom from control, and so on.

The author tried and accomplished to adapt the melodramatic genre

within the novelistic form. Moreover, as he succeeded in making a dull girl

as Catherine an unexpectedly interesting protagonist, on the other hand he

also transformed the simplicity and familiarity typical of melodrama in a

masterpiece like Washington Square.

The crowning element that represents the appropriate closure of the

melodrama is the isolated figure of Catherine that spends the rest of her life

alone in her house. The peculiarity of the genre is recalled by the plain girl,

become a woman eventually, that chooses solitude over marriage and

refuses the fate that is imposed by the authority of the society.

And yet James’s novel is not just a simple melodrama. In Washington

Square, the melodrama itself is criticized and the melodramatists (Doctor

Sloper, Aunt Penniman and Morris) are compelled to surrender themselves

and the genre they represent to the improviser Catherine. Her way of

reciting is unpredictable, for it is made of incomprehensible silences and

pauses to which soft murmurs are added. The fact that Catherine seems not

to follow any theatrical script brings down the style all the other characters

adopt.

Looking at it from another perspective, the novel could also be seen as

something different from a melodrama, since the characters’ social

49 Ibid, p. 109.

59

language cannot adapt itself to the fast changes and turn of events in which

the American society has been swallowed up.

Contesting Richard Poirier’s interpretation of Washington Square as

fairy-tale with melodramatic shades, John Lucas evidences how the

characters act as if they were on a stage representing a melodrama because

they have to accept the roles that society asks them to play.

This clarifies how, even though Washington Square is predominantly a

classic realist text, it also shows to fit in the description of an expressive

realist text.

«In an expressive realist reading the narrative discourse denies its own materiality

and offers itself as the vehicle of truth as contrasted with the more or less fallible

discourses of the characters. […] it seems important to foreground and question by

means of feminist psychoanalytic discourse the kind of subject positioning (both for

characters and readers) that WS, produced as classic realist text, invites.»50

The narrative voice in the novel is masculine and definitely close to

Doctor Sloper’s point of view. For example, Catherine, earlier in the book,

is described as “excellently, imperturbably good; affectionate, docile,

obedient”51, but if these qualities look positive in a woman, they surely

would not be regarded as such in a description of the average man of Henry

James’s times. Moreover, when Doctor Sloper expresses his opinion about

his daughter’s taste for dresses, the narrator agrees with him:

«When it had been duly impressed upon her that she was a young lady – it was a

good while before she could believe it – she suddenly developed a lively taste for dress:

a lively taste is quite the expression to use. I feel as if I ought to write it very small: her

50 B. Rasmussen, Re-Producing “James”: Marxism, Phallocentrism and “Washington Square” in Journal of American Studies, Cambridge University Press, April 1989, p. 65. 51 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 8.

60

judgment in this matter was by no means infallible; it was liable to confusions and

embarrassments.»52

As Barbara Rasmussen claims, the masculine point of view is

incessantly stated (the doctor and the narrator disdainfully refer to women

calling their sex as the “more complicated” 53 , “imperfect” 54 and

“complaisant” 55 sex) and it happens mainly because of “the narrator’s

patronizing stance”56 that brings the reader to ponder over his reflections

and to accept his truth as the definitive one.

Throughout the whole novel, James mingled together and played with

diverse literary styles and methods of constructing a story. With

Washington Square he explored melodrama, tragedy, comedy, fairy-tale,

romantic and realist novel, and putting them all in a single work, he

decided to not be bound to a unique genre, but accepted the challenge to

tell the reader a story exhibited in many forms and yet flowed into one

book.

Reviews of Washington Square

Washington Square was generally not so well-judged by James’s

contemporary critics. They were ready to evaluate all the elements of the

novel as “common-place” and to judge James’s work using the term

“dreariness”.

The character who was appreciated the most was nearly always Lavinia

Penniman, the dreamy and deluded aunt. The Dial’s magazine wrote about

her:

52 Ibid., p. 10. 53 Ibid., p. 6. 54 Ibid., p. 7. 55 Ibid, p. 82. 56 B. Rasmussen, Re-producing “James”: Marxism, Phallocentrism and “Washington Square” in Journal of American Studies, Cambridge University Press, April 1989, p. 66.

61

«And, best of all, this aunt, Mrs. Penniman, a fatuous and absurd old jenny whose

meddlesome solicitude for others is pretty certain to prove in the end the greatest

calamity that can well befall them. This character is a most amusing and delightful one,

and might be sufficient to make the reputation of a literary artist less a master of this

kind of portraiture than is Mr. James.»57

The New York Tribune added:

«By far the best character in Washington Square is Aunt Lavinia Penniman. This

romantic dame, with her passion for wholly superfluous mysteries and her good-natured

but mischievous intermeddling in the love affairs of her niece, is drawn with a masterly

skill».58

Most of the critics also found Washington Square too light or having

banal plot and characters, but they always appreciated Henry James’s skill

in “sketching” the people that inhabit his novel, every one of them with

his/her own personality, habits and peculiarities. Every character represents

a specific kind of person in the American society of the time: the rational

doctor, the too romantic aunt, the dull girl and the handsome fortune-

haunter. James does not fail to impress the critics with the ability to portray

his characters, and the Appleton’s Journal does not miss it:

«The title leads the reader to expect more than he actually finds; for, while such

local color as there is is probably faithful enough, the book does not reproduce with any

degree of adequacy either the period or the society of which Washington Square might

be regarded as typical. On the contrary, it depicts neither a place nor a period, but

belongs to the order of novels which might be classified as character-studies.»59

57 K. J. Hayes, Henry James: the Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. 58 Ibid., p. 104. 59 Ibid., p. 108.

62

The New York Edition

James was not very fond of his novel though, and in a letter to his

brother William, he wrote that the only positive character of the story was

Catherine. The concluding act of his complicated relationship with

Washington Square happened between 1907 and 1909, when the author

published the revision of his own works and decided to not insert the novel

in it, calling it “one of his ‘unhappy accidents’”.60

The New York Edition was a 26-volume collection of Henry James’s

Anglo-American novels, novellas and short stories. Apart from Washington

Square, James excluded some of his early works from the edition, like The

Europeans, and heavily modified other ones, like Roderick Hudson and

The American.

When the massive work was published, critics paid attention to James’s

revisions of his early novels and, in particular, to the prefaces he wrote for

every work included in the Edition. In these prefaces James explained the

style, the meaning and the efforts behind his works, so that posterity could

appreciate and understand him as a great writer.

The problem is that not many studies put the stress on the Edition as a

single text, but they were to focused to see it as a fragmented project. One

of those few that considered the Edition as a completed and successful

achievement was Leon Edel, the most important academic on Henry

James’s biography and work, who looked at it as a colossal masterpiece

that represented the peak of James’s productive literary career.

Additionally, studies on the Edition not only were necessary to pose

questions about Henry James as an author, but to also contemplate the

matter of modern authorship itself. An issue, unfortunately, was that James

60 M. Simpson, Introduction in Henry James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. vi.

63

should have been addressed as the writer he was and not as a supernatural

entity that poured into his work all of his knowledge.

«Part of the problem with traditional readings of the Edition, moreover, is that they

enshrine not only Henry James but a conception of authorship – the author as

autonomous, unitary, originating, and decidedly masculine genius – that seems

increasingly untenable in the wake of poststructuralism, and more than a little suspect in

the context of recent historicist, cultural, and gender criticism.»61

Presenting himself as the Master in the Edition, James had to erase

from it all the traces of the impudent manners of his youth. Most of the

time, that kind of men tried to draw attention to the mistakes of other

people, feeling themselves superior to the rest of the multitude. This

satirical attitude was easily retraceable in Doctor Sloper’s behavior and he

was consequently associated with James, for the latter wanted to avoid this

juxtaposition. Thus, this is one of the reasons why Washington Square was

not included in the Edition where James had to appear as a more mature

and wise man and author.

James’s idea of assembling the Edition began with the literary

popularity that he could never reach during his career, for he has never

been one of those writers liked and appreciated by the market and the

public at large. The author was obsessed by success and how it could have

brought to him wealth and recognition, and, with the Edition, he was

hoping, among other things, to earn some more money from his literary

activity.

The New York Edition, when published, was a product of a precise

type, the so-called “Deluxe Edition”, with refined bindings, garnished

frontispiece and explanatory additions written by the author. All these

61 D. B. McWhirter, Henry James’s New York Edition: the Construction of Authorship, Stanford,

California, Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 2-3.

64

elements made it an object that was almost a trend during those years, and

James wanted his Edition to be as good as Robert Louis Stevenson’s

collection, published in the late years of the nineteenth century.

To attain his Edition and to give it an appreciable structure, James had

to accept various publishing compromises, for example restrictions

involving copyright, literary ownership and economical obstacles. He also

had to low his barriers to the world of illustration, as he did for Washington

Square, and to surrender to it, agreeing on adding photographs to the

frontispieces of the Edition. It was a stratagem to encourage his readers to

have a different approach to his work and to make their reading activity

lighter.

Some of the works that were not included in the Edition were not just

excluded, but they had a more tormented story behind them, like in the case

of James’s considerable novel The Bostonians. The author could not

succeed in having back the copyright for this work from the publisher that

possessed it, and so he had to give it up, leaving it out of the Edition.

With the New York Edition James wanted to re-think and re-examine

his entire work for the twentieth century, creating a literary monument that

could express his view as fiction as a form of art. Attempting to achieve it,

James wrote prefaces for every single one of his works, except the ones

aforementioned, and depriving Washington Square of such a preface, the

author’s intent was clearly to ignore his novel, almost denying its own

existence. Ironically, acting like that, James treated his novel as Doctor

Sloper did with his daughter. Even doing so, nevertheless Washington

Square remained a fundamental milestone for the modern narrative that

was in development during those years.

As it has been stated, not The Europeans nor Washington Square were

included in James’s most massive effort of his literary career, but if the

65

works were to be compared, the latter seems to be more complex, mixing

together elements derived from both tragedy and comedy.

«Gertrude, the odd American girl who resists Mr. Bland but finds happiness in her

beautiful young cousin, is replaced by Catherine, who loves another beautiful young

man who this time deserves her father’s bad opinion. Yet although Catherine seems

powerless, victimized by both father and lover, she does in the end exercises choice,

refusing a belated ringing down of the curtain on a marriage ceremony; she is left free to

work out her own destiny, however limited.»62

But if, on the one hand, giving the collection that precise title signified

that James wanted to pay tribute to his hometown, on the other hand, he

also wanted to criticize that chaotic and noisy society that was evolving and

was moving towards technology and industrialization.

James’s critics and readers though were more attentive towards his

estrangement from his native land and his significant connection with

Europe rather than the homage he paid to the United States. On the one

hand, there was the attempt made by James’s editors to promote his work

as the entire collection of the first of the American novelists. On the other

hand, the Edition did not really sell in America, for American readers did

never forget James’s so-called “treason” regarding his homeland.

Film Adaptations

Origins and the Risks of Adaptation

Since the origins of cinema, film adaptation has always been a practice

of filmmaking pursued by directors and a derivative work that they tried to

achieve respecting the works they were bringing to the big screen. These

works can be of many and different kinds: autobiographies, comic books,

historical sources, novels, plays and even other films.

62 M. Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 52.

66

Initially, studies and critics on film adaptations did not exist, as they

represented an innovation in cinematic history. Literary and film criticism

belonged to two diverse areas and they were always treated separately until

then. When film adaptations started to become popular, it still was

complicated to criticize one of them not following only the parameters of

literary criticism and considering it a product of filmmaking as well. Critics

had to begin to evaluate the various problems, obstacles and limitations that

this transference from a medium to another implicates, and to base their

comments and reviews bearing in mind these complications.

Every time a film adaptation was released, the audience expected the

movie to be “faithful” to the original work it has been taken from. To insert

in the film adaptation every line, dialogue and description present, for

example, in a novel, it may not just create a product resulting in a total

failure in every aspect, but it would also be unwatchable.

A perfect example could be Erich von Stroheim’s film adaptation of

Frank Norris’s 1889 novel McTeague. Von Stroheim, attempting a literal

adaptation of the novel, in 1924 produced an original cut four hundred and

sixty-two minutes long. Lastly, he had to cut that version more than once,

to finally attain a reasonable duration of about two hours, but the result was

still unsatisfying, for it looked disjointed, as though there were some

missing parts.

This shows how it is of great importance to not excessively prioritize

the source text, because a literary and literal adaptation could result in a

flop. On the contrary, when spectators go to the cinema to watch a film

adaptation, most of them do not even know the work it was taken from; and

there were many cases in which the adaptation gained success,

consequently making the original work popular. Thanks to this process,

sometimes original works are made popular by means of their film

adaptations, where complicated narrative strategies or discourses are

67

simplified in order to bring the audience closer to it, and to even promote

the reprint of, for instance, a book.

Slowly, since the 1960s, studies on films and literature started to merge

together in a new area of expertise, with an innovative approach towards

film adaptations. Both cinema and literary work began to be regarded as of

equal significance and fair attention was given to the two media, without

putting one of them before the other.

The popularity that cinema acquired also encouraged contemporary

authors to adapt their style and to try to achieve with their writing strategies

an effect as close as possible to the frames, where one quickly comes after

the other. This phenomenon was illustrated and explained by David

Rernstein in a famous article published on The New York Times in 1937,

where he interviewed Lev Tolstoj.

«You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will

make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers. It is a direct attack on the old

methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to

the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary…But I rather like it. This

swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience – it is much better than

the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed. It is closer to

life. In life, too, changes and transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the

soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is

greatness.»63

Many critics were firstly in disagreement with Tolstoj’s words and,

even more so, they were skeptical about cinema and its potentialities. They

did not believe that it could have reached the peak of complexity in plot,

characters, style, and so on, that can be found in a novel. They thought that

those elements could just have been reproduced through writing, language

63 D. Rernstein, “Tolstoj on the Cinema”, New York Times, 31st January 1937, p. 158.

68

and figures of speech, and that, moving them on the screen, they would

have been simplified and trivialized.

But, as time went by, cinema was shown to be not an inferior art and

how it is more than capable to deal with complex questions and themes.

Just like literary works have their own structure, movies also go through a

long and not less complicated process of linguistic and audiovisual

adjustment. While the creation of a book, in most cases, involves only a

single person, the production of a movie instead requires a vastly greater

amount of people and a central role is played by an adequate coordination

between them, every group working in a different field of competence.

Moreover, the audience of a book is usually restricted to a smaller

circle of people, if compared to all those viewers who go to the cinema to

watch a movie; and while a book rarely has to face censorship, for a movie

to be released, it has to respect conditions imposed by the Production Code.

Another danger that an adaptation can face is that its outcome can

actually be disappointing. When producer and director undertake the

adaptation of a book, they already know that the original text has to be

dismembered and that many of its parts are likely to be erased or

substituted. Therefore, what they have is a reference point, a rough material

that needs to be developed without the discourses, reflections and

descriptions given in the book. They preferably focus on its characters,

main facts and culminating moments.

What is more, they are compelled by the constraints of the

aforementioned Production Code, by the necessities of the public and by a

cast formed by actors who try to play the roles of the characters at their

best. All these factors must be contemplated during the production of a

movie and the web represented by the combination of personalities, roles

and points of view of all the people within the vast team that contributes to

the final product, sometimes can turn into an impediment.

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Countless times original works become something completely different

on the screen, with the title remaining the only element left indicating the

work it took inspiration from. This likely happens when people who work

on the adaptation do not consider its adherence to the original work, but

only its success or its failure regarding the box office, so that the budget

expenses can be compensated.

Adaptations Theorized

Compared to adaptations, literature has always been seen as superior to

them, for it has a longer history and tradition. Nonetheless, this superiority

has its roots in two phenomena: iconophobia, fear of the visual, and

logophilia, love for the word, seen as something pure. Despite these two

elements, the increasing of adaptations in our culture is unavoidable. A

considerable number of movies, miniseries and series is adaptations and

takes inspiration from works represented by other media.

«Nonetheless, there must be something particularly appealing about adaptations as

adaptations.

Part of this pleasure, I want to argue, comes simply from repetition with variation,

from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise. Recognition and

remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is

change. Thematic and narrative persistence combines with material variation, with the

result that adaptations are never simply reproductions that lose the Benjaminian aura.

Rather, they carry that aura with them.»64

Adaptations should be considered and seen as adaptations, treating

them not as a single work, but rather in a pluralistic sense, as sums of

references and innovations. Because adaptation is not, of course, a

completely new work, for it always relies on an older product, but it has

64 L. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, New York, Routledge, 2006, p. 4.

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original aspects as well. “Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without

replication.”65

Adaptation can be considered from three different points of view, but

all connected between them.

«First, seen as a formal entity or product, an adaptation is an announced and

extensive transposition of a particular work or works. This “transcoding” can involve a

shift of medium (a poem to a film) or genre (an epic to a novel), or a change of frame

and therefore context: telling the same story from a different point of view, for instance,

can create a manifestly different interpretation. Transposition can also mean a shift in

ontology from the real to the fictional, from a historical account or biography to a

fictionalized narrative or drama.

[…]

Second, as a process of creation, the act of adaptation always involves both (re-)

interpretation and then (re-)creation; this has been called both appropriation or

salvaging, depending on your perspective.

[…]

Third, seen from the perspective of its process of reception, adaptation is a form of

intertextuality: we experience adaptations (as adaptations) as palimpsests through our

memory of other works that resonate through repetition with variation.»66

Adaptations are not prequels or sequels, where the public almost craves

a never-ending story, but they represent the narration of the same story

again and again. As it has already been said, adaptation satisfies both the

desire of repetition and alteration.

From a legal perspective, copyrights cannot protect ideas, but they can

protect expressions of ideas. Thanks to adaptations, it is clear how

expressions can actually be parted from ideas. Form can exist and be

independent from the content that created it. But there are elements that can

be adapted and others that cannot be transferred from the original work to

its adaptation.

65 Ibid., p. 7. 66 Ibid., p. 7-8.

71

The primary element free to be adapted from one medium to the other

is the story. Genres in which the story is told and approaches to the story

are both susceptible to alteration. All that does not change can be divided in

“themes, events, world, characters, motivations, points of view,

consequences, contexts, symbols, imagery, and so on.”67

Themes are the simplest elements to adapt. Characters are more

difficult to transfer, because they represent points of reference for the

audience acquainted with the original work. Moreover, characters’

adaptation is crucial for narrative and theatrical texts, the two genres in

which human subjects and everything that concerns are central. Characters’

psychological development plays an important role as well, for it creates a

connection between readers/spectators and characters themselves.

Narrative units can undergo alteration, but, during the process, it has

consequences on other more specific parts, like pacing and focalization.

Ultimately, what is the beginning or the end in a story can be relocated,

substituted or deleted, on the basis of what the adapter decides to do.

How to Adapt a Literary Text

Geoffrey Wagner in The Novel and the Cinema recognizes three kinds

of adaptation:

«Transposition – a novel ‘directly given on screen’; commentary – ‘where an

original is taken and either purposely or inadvertently altered in some respect’; and

analogy (e.g. a film that shifts the action of the fiction forward in time or otherwise

changes its essential context; analogy goes further than shifting a scene or playing with

the end, and must transplant the whole scenario so that little of the original is

identifiable).»68

67 Ibid., p. 10. 68 I. Whelehan et al., Adaptations, New York, Routledge, 1999, p. 8.

72

In delivering a literary text on the screen, many features of the book

(like focalization, style, point of view and figures of speech) are lost and

need to be effectuated in other and distinct ways. The person that has the

task to adapt the book on the screen has to understand and consider which

features can be kept and reproduced in the movie and which ones are

impossible to recreate.

In his Novel to Film, Brian McFarlane alludes to Roland Barthes’s

theory in which he looked at narrative as the only element that never needs

to be changed or transformed from a medium to another, but always stays

the same. Besides, Barthes made a list of narrative units that were divided

in distributional ones (represented by all the facts, events and actions that

take place during the story) and integrational ones (descriptions of places

and locations, characters’ psychological depiction, and so on). The

distributional units are further subdivided in cardinal functions (those

components that, if erased, alter the entire story) and catalyzers (those

secondary parts that fill the spaces between the main events of the story and

that can dictate the rhythm of the narrative, but cannot change its

foundation).

Distributional features can be, even if just partially, “transplanted” and

brought to the screen, but just those ones that do not involve cardinal

functions, for if they are changed, the principles on which the bases of

fidelity to the original work are built upon will collapse. On the contrary,

integrational features need to be adapted through linguistic and audiovisual

representations.

If these elements can be rendered with the adaptation, the first or third-

person narrative technique is more complex to obtain, for the reason that

camera lens will always give viewers an omniscient perspective, letting

them see what the protagonist sees, but not, for example, what they feel

and think.

73

Adapting the Past

Historical adaptations require the use of costumes, manners,

expressions related to a specific period of time, but this never stopped

directors from adapting nineteenth-century novels. This is linked to

curiosity and to a kind of nostalgia that contemporary audiences feel. Those

sentiments lead people to the wish of seeing evoked the last century in

which the contamination and oppression of technology was not as powerful

as in the last decades. This need emerges because people live with

thousands of issues and concerns piling up in their minds in these days.

These adaptations give them the chance to break free from a stressful

reality and to lose themselves in an idyllic past, even though it is just for a

matter of hours.

Adaptations of this type are also usually regarded as a light and easily

assimilable matter, since in the majority of cases, people who watch them

did not previously read the literary work as well. It is not completely

correct to consider these adaptations something not so demanding; on the

other hand, it actually is what gives them large visibility. They seem apt to

receive cinematic treatments and become popular without trouble.

The audience has always proved to prefer movie adaptations of

nineteenth-century novels, and a valid reason could be that these novels

embody some kind of moral and ideological response. In addition, they also

represent a link to the past and strengthen the public’s relationship with it,

all the more when costumes and settings are reproduced accurately and

faithfully to the period they belong to.

On the contrary, it is always difficult to truthfully represent in a movie

concepts and ideas like gender or social class, for they keep changing in

time. A proper example could be given thinking of how in movies people

who belong to working classes have an emphasized and regional accent,

while the ones belonging to upper classes speak with a perfect inflection.

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In the end, even if directors try to make their works as faithful as they

can be, working on costumes, sets and screenplays, eventually adaptations

age as well. There is a constant evolution in technology, filming, shooting

and acting, and this evolution requires a specific study.

William Wyler’s Biography

William Wyler was born on the 1st of July in 1902 in Mulhouse, Alsace,

now a region of the eastern France. At the time of Wyler’s birth, the region

belonged to the German Empire. He was born to a Jewish family, where his

Swiss-born father, Leopold, initially was a traveling salesman and later

became a haberdasher; Wyler’s mother, Melanie, was German-born.

After having had a tumultuous childhood in which Wyler was expelled

from several schools, his mother started to take him and his older brother,

Robert, to concerts, the theater and the early cinema. Wyler should have

continued his father’s job as haberdasher, but when Melanie noticed he was

not interested in it, she contacted Carl Laemmle. The latter was a distant

cousin of hers and, nevertheless, founder of Universal Pictures. He

habitually came to Europe seeking for talented young men who would

work in USA. Laemmle eventually hired Wyler at Universal Studios in

New York and, some years later, he moved to Hollywood to become a

director.

Wyler spent the early 1920s cleaning stages and moving sets, but his

work ethic was still inconstant and he was even fired in some occasions.

Finally he decided he wanted to be a director and put all his effort into it.

Wyler started as third assistant director and later became the youngest

director on the Universal, directing those westerns the film studio was so

popular for.

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The first non-western movie Wyler directed was Anybody Here Seen

Kelly? in 1928 and, after several part-talkie films, the first one he directed

which was all-talking was Hell’s Heroes in 1929. Wyler never lingered on

a single genre of movies, but he directed for Universal Pictures dramas like

The Storm (1930), A House Divided (1931), Counsellor at Law (1933) and

comedies such as Her First Mate (1933) and The Good Fairy (1935).

When he ended his collaboration with the Universal, Wyler began a

new one with the producer Samuel Goldwyn. For the latter, Wyler directed

Dodsworth (1936), These Three (1936), Dead End (1937), Wuthering

Heights (1939), The Westerner (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941). During

this period, Wyler met with cinematographer Gregg Toland and together

they ideally created the “deep focus” style of filmmaking. It consisted in

various layers of action or characters that could be seen in one single scene;

a famous example can be found in the bar scene of Wyler’s masterpiece

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

The actress Bette Davis and the actor Laurence Olivier, who both

worked with Wyler respectively in Jezebel (1938) and Wuthering Heights,

never stopped praising him. They thanked him in different occasions for

having helped them to become better film performers, for they both

received Oscar nominations under his direction.

In 1941, Wyler directed Mrs. Miniver, in which he showed the story of

an English family during the Second World War period of the German

Blitz campaign against Britain. The film intended to make feel Americans

closer to the British people’s suffering. It eventually reached its purpose,

even if it was banned by the Hays Office (before USA entered the war in

December 1941), for it was considered anti-Nazi. The entire situation did

not stop the movie from winning six Academy Awards and Wyler from

receiving his first Academy Award for Best Director. In 1949 Wyler

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directed The Heiress, giving Olivia de Havilland her second Academy

Award for Best Actress and four Awards to the movie altogether.

Wyler started the 1950s directing other remarkable movies like

Detective Story (1951) and Carrie (1952). In 1953 he introduced Audrey

Hepburn to the public with her first starring role in Roman Holiday. The

movie gave her the chance to win her first Academy Award for Best

Actress, but it also won Best Costume Design and Best Writing. In 1959,

Wyler directed one of the most successful movies in cinema history, Ben-

Hur, with Charlton Heston as its protagonist. The entire film was really

difficult to make and even those that seemed simple scenes took a long

time to be filmed. The budget for the film was also considerable, the

highest one ever at that time, and there was great tension even among

actors of the cast, for the movie was meant to be an exceptional success

from the very beginning. Eventually it brought Wyler his third Academy

Award for Best Director and eleven Academy Awards in total, the most

ever won by a single movie.

In 1968, Wyler directed Barbra Streisand in her debut movie, Funny

Girl. The movie was a huge financial success, was nominated for eight

Academy Awards and gave Streisand her first Oscar. His final movie was

two years later, in 1970, The Liberation of L.B. Jones.

On the 24th of July 1981, Wyler died from a heart attack. He surely was

one of the most important directors ever and wrote important pages in

cinema history. Under his direction, fourteen actors won an Oscar, for he

always was a point of reference for the cast and all the other people who

worked with him.

Introduction to The Heiress

James never considered Washington Square one of his finest works, on

the contrary, he was always a bit unsatisfied about it. He tried to write a

77

play for the London stage with Guy Domville, but since it was a total

failure, he did not attempt again to conquer the theater scene.

James never thought about rewriting Washington Square for mass

audiences and it is what Ruth and Augustus Goetz achieved transforming

the book into a Broadway play. The novel started drawing attention during

the mid-twentieth century, but, more generally, James’s works began to

become popular in Hollywood. The Lost Moment was released in 1947,

taking inspiration from The Aspern Papers; David Selznick had in mind a

film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove with Jennifer Jones,

unfortunately unproduced; in the end, Paramount Pictures wanted to bring

on the screen The Portrait of a Lady, but as it was not possible, they chose

to buy Goetzes’ play The Heiress.

Ideation and Casting for The Heiress

Olivia de Havilland, the famous actress who played Catherine in the

adaptation, brought to Wyler’s attention the idea for an adaptation of

James’s novel. De Havilland attended as a spectator to the stage version

produced by Jed Harris with Wendy Hiller as Catherine, Basil Rathbone as

Doctor Sloper and Peter Cookson as her suitor Morris.

Wyler attended the play in New York in January 1948, four months

after its opening. Afterward, he reached the playwrights’ agent in order to

meet with the Goetzes. When Ruth was interviewed by Jan Herman,

Wyler’s biographer, she recalled that episode:

«We came down from the country and met him at the Pierre Hotel. He wanted to

know all about James’s original story, and what we changed and what we had supplied.

I’m always amused when people say we simply took everything from the original. It’s

not true. The James story doesn’t have the jilt in it. We also found the key to the story:

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the cruel fact that Catherine is a child her father didn’t love. It was brutal stuff, and

nobody had put that in the theater before.»69

Paramount made Ruth and Augustus Goetz an offer, but they refused it,

for they wanted a percentage from the total amount. Thus, Paramount

eventually offered them $250,000 for the rights, plus $10,000 a week for

writing the screenplay: the Goetzes agreed on those terms.

Barney Balaban, as producer and president of Paramount, wanted an

excellent production and established a budget of $2.5 million. Wyler

worked not just as director but also as producer, so he hired his brother

Robert and Lester Koenig to help him as associate producers.

After the success de Havilland achieved with her last role in Anatole

Litvak’s film noir, The Snake Pit, she was in search of a challenge where

she could have played another important role. For the 1948 Academy

Awards, she was nominated as Best Actress for the movie aforementioned,

but could not win the award. Thus, she realized that the adaptation of

James’s novel and the collaboration with Wyler could have been a golden

opportunity for her to fulfill her aspirations.

De Havilland, in Gone with the Wind, played the characters of Melanie

Wilkes, a mild woman, and, with this new movie, she was willing to

perform a different kind of woman, initially good, but eventually rebellious

against her father’s authority. Still, de Havilland’s Catherine is not exactly

the same Catherine James depicted in his novel.

«In de Havilland’s hands, the character is less stoic than in the novel, particularly in

the scenes with Aunt Penniman (Miriam Hopkins), where there is a hint of deeper

feelings and even a suggestion of wit. For example, Catherine undercuts her aunt’s

patently insincere effusions about her late husband and then covers her face with a fan

so that her startled aunt cannot read her expression. Her voice even changes timbre in

69 G. Miller, William Wyler, Lexington, Kentucky, University Press of Kentucky, 2013, pp. 264-265.

79

the latter part of the film to denote her hardening of character and a new stiffening of

defenses against people who seek to take advantage of her former trust.»70

When The Heiress was released, critics commented upon it that it did

not represent the tragedy of Washington Square in its full harshness.

Moreover, Catherine Sloper of The Heiress (both play and movie)

significantly varies from the protagonist of the novel. Jerry Clarkson

argued

«Whereas James’s heroine shows internal moral development, Wyler’s heroine

displays an abrupt reversal of character: first she is a duped innocent, and then she is a

stoic domestic warrior returning injury in kind. Or, to put it differently, whereas James’s

narrative is based on a line of moral development, Wyler’s film is based on the

symmetry of revenge.»71

The fact is that Wyler’s intention was not to reproduce in detail the plot

of the novel with all its intricacies. His idea was especially to build a movie

centered on the star Olivia de Havilland, paying attention to the theme of

contemporary gender politics.

De Havilland’s persona was changing during those years. As it has

already been said, initially she was associated to “lovely” characters.

Warner Brothers kept assigning her roles she did not like, so she started

taking suspensions without pay. When her contract with Warner Brothers

was expired, de Havilland thought she could leave, but the company did

not let her go. Warner Brothers insisted that the actress still owed the studio

seven years of active labor that she accumulated taking suspensions. But

after she won in court in 1944 against the company, she acquired the fame

of a strong woman. This gave de Havilland the possibility to decide in

which movies to appear and also to rely on her own economic resources.

70 N. Sinyard, A Wonderful Heart, Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2013, p. 124. 71 L. Raw, Adapting Henry James to the Screen, Lanham, Maryland, Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006, pp. 41-42.

80

The Heiress helped her to strengthen this impression and image people held

of her.

Ralph Richardson, having played already many roles, was already

popular on the British stage along with his contemporaries Peggy Ashcroft,

John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier. In London the play based on

Washington Square was staged by the aforementioned Gielgud, Ashcroft,

alternating with Wendy Hiller for Catherine’s role and Richardson as the

doctor.

In an interview 72 , Wyler defined him an actor who could not be

directed. Even more, he admitted that the very first time they were deciding

to prepare a scene, the one in which Doctor Sloper returns home and hangs

his hat and coat, Richardson did everything so naturally that the director

was astonished by his talent.

Not only Richardson’s physical grace, but his vocal control is

remarkable too. A scene in which Richardson’s quality stands out is the one

where Doctor Sloper, at the engagement party of his niece, looks at

Catherine, noticing her clumsiness and how she inherited nothing from her

mother’s elegance. Aunt Almond reprimands him, telling him he should

appreciate his daughter more, but he resentfully answers: “Only I know

what I lost when she died, and what I got in her place”. In the second part

of his statement, Richardson lowers the tone of his voice, making it sound

like a bass note where pain and bitterness can be both distinguished.

In one of the final moments of the movie, when Catherine and her

father return from their journey in Europe and he discovers Morris has been

in his house during their absence, Richardson emphasizes how the doctor

completely loses his composure. He underscores how Catherine has no

other true value than money and, violently hitting the chair, accentuates his

anger on the word “money”. Additionally, Richardson adds that the only

72 N. Sinyard, A Wonderful Heart, Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2013, p. 124.

81

value he recognizes in her is that she can embroider neatly, this time

stressing “neatly” in a scornful way. This part suggests the end of the

father/daughter relationship, because Catherine finally understands that she

did not just fail his father, but that he disdains her.

The choice of Montgomery Clift to play Morris Townsend’s part was

not as simple for Wyler. Clift had appeared in only a couple of movies and

people would not have known what to expect in Morris’s role.

Initially, Wyler wanted to exploit Errol Flynn’s public image as

Casanova. Flynn also costarred by de Havilland’s side in Robin Hood and

other movies, having a solid career behind him. In the end, Wyler, uses

Clift’s unknown persona to his advantage and choose him instead of Flynn,

because of the latter had no interest in the role and because it was requested

from the Goetzes to make of Morris’s character less of a villain than he was

in their original play. Later, after the box-office failure of the movie, Wyler

reflected:

«“He’s got to be convincing to her or she looked like a fool. And he was so

convincing that when it turned out that he was after her money it was such a

disappointment…That the audience was so disappointed, you know not getting a happy

ending to this beautiful couple…I went too far this way…I don’t know what

happened.”»73

In the novel, James depicted Morris almost from the beginning as

untrustworthy, and the reader, already from the first pages, could

understand which were his real intentions. Wyler, on the other hand, offers

another interpretation where Morris is more ambiguous and fragile before

the doctor’s authority and even thoughtful towards Catherine, for instance

in the scene where, before her trip to Europe, he makes her a gift.

73 G. Miller, William Wyler, Lexington, Kentucky, University Press of Kentucky, 2013, p. 277.

82

In order to preserve Morris’s ambiguity, Wyler keeps him away, in

shadow, hiding his facial expressions during the phases in which he courted

Catherine. An indicative example is the initial engagement party, where

Morris conceals himself so that the audience does not precisely know what

he is actually thinking or feeling.

Because of the disappointment Wyler receives for the box-office of the

movie, he even wondered if this Morris’s vagueness was the right choice,

for the public usually favored him and felt sorry when, in the end, he is

rejected by Catherine. But, in the end, Wyler knew that his own decision

was right after all, for he understood that, portraying Morris like that, he

made the character more interesting and prolonged the audience’s curiosity

about his motives.

Clift was impatient to meet Wyler, whom he greatly admired, despite

feeling intimidated by his popularity. During the very first days of

shooting, the actor asked Wyler to not reprimand him in front of everyone.

The director, even amused by this weird request, reassured him he would

not have done that. To tell the truth, Wyler never liked the fact that Clift

was routinely accompanied by his acting coach on the set and continuously

asked for her advice.

In general, the actors were not really friendly with each other, even if

they had to work together on the set. More than once Clift expressed his

antipathy towards de Havilland, believing she was not such a good actress.

«She memorizes her lines at night and comes to work waiting for the director to tell

her what to do. You can’t get by with that in the theater; and you don’t have to in the

movies. Her performance is being totally shaped by Wyler.»74

The Goetzes agreed with Clift, for they, too, thought Wyler was

focusing too much on de Havilland.

74 Ibid., p. 266.

83

«She got a lot of attention from Willy because he knew she didn’t really have the

ass to swing it. She was so heavyweight. Tola [Anatole Litvak] had gotten a good

performance out of her in The Snake Pit. That was really her only serious picture. Willy

believed he could get a good performance too, if he kept at her.»75

The Heiress (1949)

When Martin Scorsese was working on his adaptation of The Age of

Innocence by Edith Wharton, he also kept an eye on Wyler’s The Heiress,

for the latter embodied a point of reference for all the dramas set in the

nineteenth century. Furthermore, Tom Cruise was considering a remake of

Wyler’s masterpiece, but, with the director Mike Nichols, eventually

decided to give up, because the 1949 adaptation had already reached

perfection.

The Heiress was premiered in New York in October 1949 and after

three months in London as well. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times

wrote about Wyler’s movie:

«“Not many film producers are able to do the sort of thing that William Wyler has

done with ‘The Heiress’, the mordant stage play of two seasons back. For Mr. Wyler

has taken this drama, which is essentially of the drawing-room and particularly of an era

of stilted manners and rigid attitudes, and has made it into a motion picture that crackles

with allusive life and fire in its tender and agonized telling of an extraordinary

characterful tale.”»76

After the release, the movie earned enough money to cover production

costs in six months, so it was not as successful outside New York from that

point of view. Wyler, disappointed, in an interview to Variety admitted:

75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., pp. 276-277.

84

«“I expected it to make a lot of money. It cost too much. It should have been done

cheaper. But then it wouldn’t have been the same picture. As it was, I didn’t go over the

estimated budget by more than sixty to seventy thousand dollars.”»77

Even so, it was nominated for eight Oscars and won half of them: Best

Actress, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, and Best Score. In

addition, it also gave James’s Washington Square a boost, as a paperback

edition of the movie was published in 1949 with the text of the novel and

thirteen pictures taken from the adaptation. Hollywoodian adaptations

started to generate interest at the end of 1940s and many reprints of James’s

works were published.

In the credits of the movie it is important to notice that there is no

“adapted from”, but “suggested by” James’s Washington Square. It is a

detail worth noticing, for in the movie there are many parts that were not

present in the novel. The title is the first thing that was changed from the

novel to the film; the focus is on the protagonist and on the fact that her

father is going to leave her a conspicuous inheritance.

With James, Wyler shared a European point of view, as the director

preferred domestic tragedies over normal ones. The Big Country is another

movie in which Wyler highlighted the relationship between father and

daughter and here there is an engagement party as well.

But in The Heiress the engagement is Catherine’s cousin’s and the

close-ups of her face are not fortuitous. One is led to believe she is jealous

of her cousin because Marian got engaged, but, thinking about it more

carefully, it could also be that her jealousy is directed towards another kind

of desire. As she stares at her uncle, it is possible that all that Catherine

wants is the love and affection that he shows his daughter in front of all

those people, showing how he is a proud and not a disappointed father.

77 Ibid., p. 277.

85

The difference between Doctor Sloper’s fatherly behavior and Uncle

Jefferson’s one is apparent right from the beginning. Before the

engagement party, when Catherine desires to show her new red dress to her

father, he makes her seem ridiculous using the same sentence the novel

character addresses to his daughter: “Is it possible that this magnificent

person is my daughter?”.

The doctor goes on mocking Catherine, knowing that her dress has the

same color that was her mother’s favorite, cherry red: “Ah, but your mother

was fair. She dominated the color.” It is evident here how Catherine

eventually shows her pain after her father’s words.

An alteration occurs in the movie regarding Catherine’s first meeting

with Morris. In the novel, they meet at Aunt Almond’s place for a small

soirée and not for a crowded engagement party. Additionally, Catherine

lets Morris lead the conversation nearly for the entire time, for she is shy

and too busy studying his naturalness and talkativeness.

When they first meet in a gazebo, scenes focus on Catherine’s growing

interest for this young man who sits next to her and then also invites her to

dance. Her interest is highlighted by close-ups of de Havilland’s facial

expressions. At the beginning, Catherine feels uncomfortable, she covers

her face with a fan to hide the embarrassment to be there with an unmarried

man.

The situation changes the moment in which Morris looks at his blank

dance card and Catherine, looking at it as well, feels more confident, for

her dance card is empty as well. This gives her the courage to put her fan

away and to directly look into Morris’s eyes, following his discourse.

In the novel, the description written by James about Morris’s tenor kind

of voice is transformed in the movie. He plays the piano and sings a

popular song for Catherine. The song is called “Plaisir d’Amour” and was

inserted in the movie by the composer Aaron Copland, who wrote his own

86

soundtrack for The Heiress, except for this song. It is a sign of the

importance of that moment of courtship between Morris and Catherine, for

the lyrics of the song say: “The joys of love/Last but a short time/The pains

of love/Last all your life/All your life”. The words represent an ominous

prophecy, but Catherine does not pay much attention to them; she is lost in

the contemplation of her lover and defines “Plaisir d’Amour” a “lovely

song”.

She does not even realize that Morris’s rendition is somehow off-key

and that even the piano needs to be retuned. Later, as if to confirm that,

Doctor Sloper asks her how the harp lesson went and Catherine answers

that she seems not to have “a very true ear” for the instrument. The doctor

hurts Catherine’s pride in front of Morris by recalling her mother’s

“impeccable” ear.

During the first phases of courtship, Morris keeps invading Catherine

mental but also physical space: when he is insisting on being her lover,

trying to convince her to give him an opportunity, he even ends up making

her fall backwards while she is pressing herself against a door.

Catherine’s comparison with her deceased mother is a leitmotiv

throughout the movie. Another significant moment is Doctor Sloper’s

meeting with Morris’s sister, Mrs. Montgomery. Unlike in the novel, where

Doctor Sloper goes to her place, in the adaptation she comes to pay him a

visit. The meeting is kept in the doctor’s office and there, on his desk, there

is a little portrait of his wife that Mrs. Montgomery notices and analyzes

closely. She thinks that the woman in the portrait is Catherine and the

doctor takes advantage of this misinterpretation to show Mrs. Montgomery

his daughter’s frailty and awkwardness, as he calls her into his office.

The relevance of that portrait returns later in the movie, when Doctor

Sloper, returning to his office after he diagnosed himself as terminally-ill,

grabs it and puts it in his pocket. It is a moving scene because, being the

87

doctor aware that he will never have the chance to return to that room

again, he takes with him what he considers his dearest and most precious

object.

In Paris, when Catherine is on a journey with her father, he conveys an

aura of sadness, stressed by a shot of his loneliness when he is surrounded

by the empty tables of the café. Only later Catherine discovers that it was a

special place to her father, for he used to go there with her wife.

Morris’s words resound in this scene, words he says during his first

dinner at Washington Square. Discovering that Doctor Sloper had been in

Paris as well with his wife for their honeymoon and learning that he prefers

Paris to never change, Morris answers: “Oh, in that case, Paris can never

change for you, doctor.” This statement reveals how the doctor tends to

have a conservative behavior towards everything and everyone that

surrounds him. It seems that he does not even want his daughter to find

happiness and to have a life of her own, built on the basis of her choices

and experiences.

After Catherine has been jilted by Morris, there is an encounter

between her and the doctor, where he tells her that he will soon die. De

Havilland’s countenance does not communicate any kind of emotions while

Maria bursts into tears, as if she were Doctor Sloper’s actual daughter and

not Catherine. Even on the doctor’s deathbed, when Maria calls Catherine

for her father wants to see her, she refuses.

Maybe Catherine’s reaction can seem exaggerated and excessively

harsh, but in the end she just gives Doctor Sloper the same treatment he

reserved to her for her entire life. After all, in the movie, Wyler perfectly

followed what James wrote in the book about the doctor’s behavior towards

his daughter: “You would have surprised him if you had told him so, but it

88

is a literal fact that he almost never addressed his daughter save in the

ironical form”.78

In an article he wrote on his film for the New York Herald Tribune,

Wyler admitted that one of the particularities of James’s novel that

attracted his attention was the fact that the protagonist, in the end is not the

same person she was at the beginning of the story.

“Unlike so many films which leave their characters pretty much as they discover

them, Catherine Sloper would undergo a series of experiences which would change the

very texture and inner structure of her personality.”79

The female protagonist starts from being a character that is almost a

spectator of her own life, observing how all the other characters make their

moves around her, to finally be an active presence and make her own

decisions.

«In a claustrophobic masculine house, in which the sliding doors seem to turn the

rooms into so many cells, the quiet heroine is variously buffeted by the rival challenges

of scientific rationalism (her father), effusive romanticism (her aunt), and mercenary

opportunism (her suitor).»80

Growing and becoming more mature as a person, on the other hand,

Catherine also seems to resemble more and more Doctor Sloper in some of

her aspects. It is as if she does not inherit only part of his fortune, but even

part of his disposition.

She eventually has for her father the same contempt he has for her

during the entire film. When the doctor enters the embroidery room,

Catherine nearly does not have the courage to look at him straight in the

eyes. He definitely appears ill, nonetheless his daughter cannot directly turn

her gaze towards him, rather she addresses his reflection in the mirror.

78 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 21. 79 N. Sinyard, A Wonderful Heart, Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2013, p. 127. 80 Ibid.

89

Even her behavior towards Morris undergoes a substantial

transformation. Initially, during Morris’s courtship, Catherine seems less

mature and inexperienced compared to him. This changes later in the

movie as she makes him look silly and ridiculous, while she is cold and

unconcerned. In the final scene, when she gives Morris the ruby buttons

that meant to be the wedding gift, he interprets it as an act of renewed love

in his regard. In truth, they represent a parting gift, as Catherine makes a

difficult decision, but also shows that she can learn from her past and from

her mistakes.

After rejecting Morris, Aunt Penniman accuses Catherine “Can you be

so cruel?”. Catherine answers “Yes, I can be very cruel. I have been taught

by masters.” The term “masters” is not accidental, for, during the movie, all

the people around Catherine do not care about her feelings and needs, but

use her to achieve their own purposes.

If in the novel Catherine was left by James “in the parlor, picking up

her morsel of fancywork”81, in the movie she does not appear as mournful.

On the contrary, with Morris’s return, she seems motivated to react and to

put an end to that unfortunate event of her life.

She says that the embroidery she just finished is the very last one she

will ever make, as a symbol of closing between her and Morris. The act of

cutting the last thread of the embroidered alphabet and, more specifically,

of the letter “Z” signifies the ending of her story with Morris. The meaning

the protagonist conveys with that deed is clear: any woman can gather

strength and follow Catherine’s example, cutting the threads of an

unhealthy relationship and conquer freedom.

The act of Catherine finally rejecting Morris is represented by the door

that she orders Maria to bolt. While Morris continues to pound on the door,

screaming Catherine’s name, at a certain point he can clearly see the light

81 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, p. 209.

90

coming from the inside that slowly fades away. While Catherine climbs the

staircase, Wyler highlights with the angle of the camera how her steps are

firm, for she succeeds in defeating those men who had dominated over her.

From Washington Square to The Heiress

One of the first decisions Wyler made was to soften the male

protagonists, Doctor Sloper and Morris. He wanted them to be more

ambivalent, to give them a different connotations compared to the

characters in the novel. Spectators could never be sure about Morris’s true

nature until the end. The doctor, unlike in the novel, before dying, decides

not to disinherit his daughter, as if he regretted all the bad he has done to

her. Wyler, after all, could cause those changes in the characters as he was

his own producer.

Furthermore, the movie shows a kind of bleak postwar atmosphere

already seen in the 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives. As in those movies

soldiers came back home to find out that their wives or lovers were dead or

adulterous, in the same way Catherine discovers that the patriarchal society

in which she put her trust in, actually never helps her to achieve her desires.

The fact that the social world she lives in appears gloomy and spoiled to

her, makes her almost similar to a protagonist from a noir movie.

In the movie Catherine emerged as a powerful dramatic character: her

father’s irony and contempt forced her to change her nature and to have a

role she does not like. Unlike in James’s novel, Catherine’s reaction in the

film is more evident and the end itself is clearly a direct revenge the

protagonist takes against the people who wronged her.

Money is central in the novel and Wyler highlights its relevance from

the very beginning by entitling his film adaptation The Heiress. Catherine’s

income, $30,000 a year, at least initially, seems to be even more important

than the protagonist who owns it. The heroine’s money is surely more

91

mentioned than Catherine’s qualities and positive aspects. Her father, her

two aunts, Morris, everyone makes comments about it, but in the end

Catherine proves them wrong because she has never been positively

considered or truly loved by anyone.

Making Catherine’s vengeance more visible than the book, the Goetzes

also embitter the conflict between her and Doctor Sloper. Moreover, in the

book Morris ends in a clumsy way his relationship with Catherine, sending

her a letter. In the film instead he plans to elope with her, but he finally

does not keep his word. In this way, circumstances are even more dramatic,

for the protagonist understands that she is not loved by him either, right

after her father admitted his scorn for her.

The final scene is no exception, because Catherine, in the novel, is

more mature (twenty years have passed since her last meeting with Morris),

thus she keeps her composure and tells Morris she is not willing to marry

him. The fact that in the adaptation Morris keeps his youthfulness makes

Catherine’s final choice even more tragic. At the end of James’s novel, she

is just “an admirable old maid”82 who almost feels no satisfaction at all in

rejecting her former suitor. In the film, the protagonist at first seems

intentioned in giving Morris a second chance. She makes him and the

audience believe it, until she has the door bolted and, in a very dramatic

way, keeps him out of her house and life forever.

One of the greatest differences between Wyler’s adaptation and the

novel is that the protagonist not only becomes aware of her father’s disdain,

her suitor’s dishonesty and her aunt’s insincere interest towards her, but she

plans to wreak revenge on them all.

The way in which her behavior radically changes in the story makes the

audience nearly feel more empathetic towards Doctor Sloper and Morris.

Becoming stronger and colder towards the people who hurt her, Catherine

82 Ibid., p. 192.

92

turns into a version of herself who is more similar to her father than to her

former self. With Catherine adapting herself to the atmosphere and world

that surround her, Wyler leaves his audience in a hopeless condition. In the

novel, James’s final situation is not better, but at least readers can admire

Catherine. Here the anti-heroine refuses to become the same monster her

father was and finds her peace closing herself in a silent and resigned

dignity.

Women’s Freedom and Luxury Goods

On the one hand, the ending of The Heiress can be seen as a warning

for the 1940s women who dreamed of a future where they are independent

and without a marriage partner. On the other hand, Wyler, with de

Havilland playing Catherine’s role, showed a strong, attractive and rich

woman who did not need a man’s company, especially during the last

scenes of the movie.

Moreover, the production design aiming at promoting jewels, cars and

handbags through the film emphasized even more women’s independence.

Their freedom was connected to the purchase of luxury goods and was also

the reason why movies with women as protagonists underscored sets and

costumes as objects for consumption.

The Heiress deals with the difficult path a woman has to take, finding

herself into a critical moment in her life and trying not to surrender, but to

make the best out of it. Catherine’s growth, from a simple girl to a resolute

woman, is also symbolized through Harry Horner’s costume designs.

When dressing for her cousin’s engagement party and in the first scenes

of the movie, Catherine wears unfashionable clothes. Doctor Sloper also

reminds her how she is not able to wear them in a classy way. At the

engagement party and in other circumstances, Catherine keeps showing

how she completely lacks grace in her manners. When she returns from

93

Europe, Catherine is a changed person, for she possesses elegance and

dresses in the latest French style.

Critics were also struck by the fact that de Havilland, playing

Catherine’s role, did not wear make-up on her face, presenting it as natural

as it was. Thus, de Havilland, embodying Catherine’s character and

principles, in The Heiress represented the exact antithesis of the standard

Hollywoodian beauty.

Apart from the attention given to costumes and their meaning, Horner

also helped Wyler to recreate settings. The director specified how he

wanted the house to be arranged: “The story may be a serious one, but this

should not show in the designs of the house, since the structure could not

know in advance what the inhabitants would do.” 83 Horner respected

Wyler’s indications and they resolved to place a “dramatic staircase”84 in

the entrance hall.

What the movie communicated was that anyone who was trying to

achieve a betterment of his/her life could find it by looking at Catherine as

role-model. She does not just mature as a person, but has dresses, jewels

and a large inheritance. These were the things advertised on the posters at

the movie premiere at the Radio City Music Hall in 1949 and in other

circumstances.

«Paramount organized several tie-in campaigns – one invited filmgoers to write

reviews of the film, with three Kaiser-Frazer cars valued at over $2,000 each as prizes

for the best entries. Any enterprising cinema manager who worked out the best

promotional campaign could also win a car; he or she (though presumably he) would be

taken to the factory in Willow Rim, Michigan, where he would pick up the car for

himself. […] They could try making her costumes for themselves; a sampler design was

published in November 1949 issue of Good Housekeeping, with a chart for embroidery

based on the film’s title being published in the same magazine three months later.

Anyone seeking more embroidery could send for a booklet of designs. The press book

83 L. Raw, Adapting Henry James to the Screen, Lanham, Maryland, Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006, p. 44. 84 Ibid.

94

also proposed an heiress-for-a-day campaign where local business were encouraged to

provide free services for one lucky girl, who would have the chance to buy the clothes

she wanted and enjoy a free beauty treatment.»85

Those people who organized the campaign did not want just to

encourage American people, women particularly, to spend their money in

goods. With The Heiress and its campaign, Wyler and the people who

worked at them also tried to give women an alternative to their traditional

role of wives or mothers. The person who embodied this alternative was

Catherine in the movie and Olivia de Havilland in real life. She became an

example of woman who fought and achieved her own independence,

rejecting the roles other (chiefly male) studio bosses wanted her to accept.

Catherine’s Three Phases

Three different climbs of staircase that Catherine makes in the film

represent the passage through three emotional stages she experiences and

each time she climbs the stairs, it has a symbolic meaning in the movie.

The first climb is after Catherine told her father of her engagement with

Morris and she is joyfully ascending the stairs. In his study, Doctor Sloper

is caught by the camera anything but joyful, his gloomy mood being pretty

evident. These two opposite emotional states are emphasized by Copland’s

music: a lively theme for strings to describe Catherine’s happiness and a

pensive and heavier motif to render the doctor’s feelings.

When Catherine communicates her decision to the doctor, highlighting

the fact that Morris truly loves her back (“and he wants me”), her father

turns away, not just feeling awkward because of this announcement, but

also incredulous. In this scene, Richardson’s acting is remarkable, as even

in little gestures or light movements of his body, he is able to convey those

exact feelings spectators would expect, with unique accuracy.

85 Ibid., p. 45.

95

The second climb happens when Catherine is jilted by Morris, after she

waited for him to come pick her up. Wyler’s decision to add this part to the

movie is a substantial change when compared to the novel, where the

romantic relationship between the two is almost nonexistent. Of course

Wyler wanted to alter James’s original version, for the medium was

different from the book and he wanted to add more drama and pathos for

the mass market.

When Aunt Penniman rhetorically asks Catherine “Oh dear girl, why

were you not a little more clever?”, she refers to the fact that Catherine

should have told Morris that her father wanted to disinherit her only after

their elopement, not before. The protagonist rejects to even think of it and

the two women remain there, both not daring to move from that room.

They avoid eye-contact and even though they are both unhappy, the reason

is not the same.

As the clock strikes, Catherine starts crying uncontrollably and Aunt

Penniman tries to unsuccessfully console her, closing the sliding doors

behind her. Later, Catherine finally leaves the room and climbs the stairs

carrying the suitcase she previously prepared for her journey with Morris.

The ascent seems really difficult for her and this effect was obtained by

Wyler adopting a precise stratagem. He decided to fill de Havilland’s

baggage with books, so that her climb in the movie appears difficult not

only because of the weight of the baggage, but especially for sorrow and

desperation felt by the protagonist. Apart from being rejected by her lover,

additionally Catherine has to surrender herself to the idea that her father

was right about Morris.

The third and last climb takes place at the end of the movie, when

Catherine ascends the stairs, as if she is deaf to Morris’s pleading, while he

screams her name behind the bolted door. Though this final climb is

different, for Catherine does not feel the burden of disappointment and pain

96

on her back, but like a towering figure, dominating the scene, thanks to

Wyler’s placement of the camera.

In James’s novel, when Morris returns to Washington Square twenty

years have passed since his departure. Catherine shows surprise looking at

him to study all the changes he underwent through all those years, she is

not even sure why she liked him. There are in the book many observations

the protagonist makes in her mind while analyzing that forty-five year old

man in front of her.

«She would have never known him. […] She continued to look at him, however,

and as she did so she made the strangest observation. It seemed to be he, and yet not he;

it was the man who had been everything, and yet this person was nothing. […] It was

very different from his old – from his young – face. If she had first seen him this way

she would have not liked him.»86

After Catherine points out that he should not have come and resisting

Morris’s attempts to persuade her, he leaves the house frustrated and she

returns to her embroidery.

In the movie things go differently, because only five years have passed

and, unlike in the novel where it is clear he still is the same opportunist he

was, Wyler’s Morris is younger and more ambiguous. This lets the

audience that did not read the book hope for some kind of redemption and

for a Hollywoodian happy ending.

Another change in the adaptation is that Doctor Sloper did not

disinherit his daughter and Morris claims that his flight was caused by his

desire to not let Catherine’s father disinherit her. Being informed of it,

Morris defends himself saying “I didn’t know that” and, with a hint of

bitterness, Catherine answers “I know you didn’t”, giving a completely

new interpretation of the scene.

86 H. James, Washington Square, New York, Signet Classics, 2013, pp. 205-207.

97

Furthermore, Morris seems to like even more Catherine now that she

has become more cynical and less naïve. This detail is really ironic, like the

scene in which Doctor Sloper thinks she has given up Morris, almost

admiring her for her decision. But when he knows the truth, he explicitly

shows her all the contempt he harbored during the years. Later, on his

deathbed, when Maria, Catherine’s maiden, calls her for her father wants to

see her, the protagonist answers her “Too late, Maria”.

The Symbolism of Objects and Space

From the very beginning of the movie, in the opening credit, Wyler let

the audience understand that the space surrounding the protagonists played

an important role. In Wyler’s adaptations like The Heiress, it was even

more noteworthy, for it represented the confines in which characters were

“trapped”, almost without having the opportunity to be in contact with the

outside.

«Most of the film takes place in various rooms of the house – with one notable

exception and two minor ones. One central scene takes place at a dance at the home of

Catherine’s cousin, where she meets Morris. The other two are brief: a scene in a Paris

café during Catherine’s unhappy European trip with her father, and a later one in the

park outside her house, when she refuses to go to her father’s deathbed.»87

In Wyler’s movies, stairs hold a significance of control and strength

while mirrors and windows frames represent helplessness and constriction.

When, for example, Catherine occupies a space within the frame of her

father’s office, she conveys an impression of imprisonment. Creating an

opposite mood, in the famous final scene, ascending the stairs with Morris

out of her door, Catherine is the one who holds authority.

87 G. Miller, William Wyler, Lexington, Kentucky, University Press of Kentucky, 2013, p. 270.

98

The scene of the engagement party is quite different from how James

depicted it in his novel. If the author makes things between Catherine and

Morris develop really quick, in the movie the entire party is seen

differently. Catherine and Morris seem to have more time to know each

other, in a more natural way.

Morris’s arrival on the scene already gives a hint of what his real

intentions are. His being caught in the frame reveals that he is not a positive

character. Initially Morris’s face is not even showed and only his back is

visible, as he walks across the frame. Then he sits next to Catherine, taking

Aunt Penniman’s place, and it is clear that he does not share the screen

with her, but tries to dominate it.

Later, when Morris and the protagonist start dancing, the camera angle

has the effect to make them seem the only couple to dance. In this scene,

Catherine looks finally comfortable and at ease in his presence. Her

emotional state is different from the previous one in which Doctor Sloper

was with her and her awkwardness was painfully evident.

When Morris arrives at Washington Square to meet Catherine and they

remain alone, he keeps trying to invading her space in this scene as well.

She tries to move away to a separate frame, but Morris goes after her

anyway.

In the following scene, to emphasize the contrast, while Morris plays

the piano, the physical distance between them is notable. Even after

Morris’s exhortation to sit closer to him, Catherine keeps her distance from

her pursuer. The moment is meaningful, because the song Morris sings for

Catherine is not fitting. Morris is courting Catherine, but the song he

dedicates to her is actually sorrowful and sad. After Morris translates the

words of the song to Catherine, the distance between them acquires a more

revelatory significance.

99

At this point, Morris proposes to Catherine and leaves. Catherine is

framed once more, this time by the doorway, and her image is reflected in a

mirror. Near her, there is a lamp and a similar one is present in the next

scene, when she tells Doctor Sloper of Morris’s proposal and her father

walks away from her to take a cigar.

Again, when Catherine joyfully climbs the staircase, this time shadows

can be noticed behind her, despite her ecstatic mood. To close this series of

shots in a crucial part of the movie, Doctor Sloper is caught in a frame, and

his facial expression clearly tells about his preoccupation. All these objects

and elements are perfectly arranged and filmed by Wyler, for they

prefigure ominous events as the movie goes on.

From the first scene in which he appears, Morris’s ambiguity, played

by Clift, is undeniable. His modern and American charming presence

contrasts with the more traditional and English style embodied by

Richardson. Morris’s ambivalence is even more perceivable at the end of

the engagement party, after having said goodnight to Catherine. Here,

Wyler’s camera insists on Morris’s countenance, covered by a veil of

mystery, and stays on him for a long time, until the closure of the scene.

Another significant scene in the movie is the one in which Morris

escapes leaving Catherine behind. Before this tragic event, the two meet

out of Catherine’s house to arrange their elopement. The encounter is under

the rain and in Wyler’s movies it is always an ominous element. Catherine

tells Morris that she does not want to receive her father’s money and, for an

instant, he looks at her in a different way. Nonetheless he ensures Catherine

that, after making the necessary preparations for their trip, he will come

back to pick her up.

Back into her house, Catherine brings with her some bags down the

stairs using a lamp to light the dark space around here. Not just her

100

surroundings are black, but her dress as well. The gloomy atmosphere does

not stop the protagonist from feeling thrilled.

As she sits near the lamp, next to her there is a mirror in which moving

shadows can be seen when Aunt Penniman is coming down the staircase: a

scene that could perfectly be taken from a horror movie. Catherine explains

the entire situation to her aunt and also that her father will disinherit her.

Aunt Penniman asks her niece if she has told Morris of those circumstances

and Catherine confirms it. In this moment, from her aunt’s reaction,

Catherine understands that she shares the same opinion about Morris that

Doctor Sloper has. So they sit together waiting in silence.

As Gabriel Miller claims

«Wyler stages the next sequence formally, emphasizing its pictorial and geometric

style. Catherine is seen in profile, seated by a column in the sitting room and parallel to

her aunt, who is seated by near the lamp by the window. Catherine, though anticipating

her wedding, is dressed in black, like a widow; her aunt is in white. The color reversal

highlights Catherine’s betrayal. Both women sit still, a shadow between them. When

Catherine finally asks why she shouldn’t have told Morris about the money, Aunt

Penniman replies, “Oh, dear girl, why were you not a little more clever?” Her aunt’s

words imply what Catherine must now recognize – that the male-dominated social

world is governed by money and power. Aunt Penniman herself has learned to survive

in the constricted space she inhabits – after all, she lives in the house at her brother’s

invitation.»88

After the bitter lesson Aunt Penniman gives her, Catherine bursts into

tears and the aunt closes the sliding doors of the room, as if to shield her

niece from the audience. When Catherine later leaves the room, she

ascends the stairs with her baggage, heavily dragging them.

The opposite action is performed by Doctor Sloper in the next scene,

weak and ill, when he descends the staircase. It is the first time the doctor is

88 Ibid., p. 274.

101

seen on the stairs and the fact that he is descending them represents his loss

of power, both physical and mental. The doctor enters the room and

Catherine is there working on her embroidery: her image is once more

reflected in a mirror and her countenance shows her strength and

determination. She is now the one who holds control, contrasting with the

limping figure of her father.

Unlike the previous scenes, Doctor Sloper’s office is unlit and the

curtains are drawn. Becoming aware of the fact that he will die soon,

Doctor Sloper gives his daughter and Maria the tragic news. The latter

starts crying while, on the contrary, Catherine is unmoved. As Maria goes

away and the two remain alone, the protagonist uses her father’s words and

contempt against him, uncaring of the fact he is dying.

«“You have cheated me. You thought that any handsome, clever man would be as

bored as you were…It was not love that made you protect me. It was contempt.” She

goes on to say, “I don’t know that Morris would have hurt me or starved me for

affection more than you did.”»89

Further, when Catherine threatens the doctor of rewriting his will by

disinheriting herself, Wyler places him at the front of the frame to

underscore his desperation. In this passage, it is Catherine the one who is

cruel. The result of this dialogue is that the audience ends up favoring and

feeling closer to Doctor Sloper’s reasons. Now the doctor is defenseless, he

is in the same position that Catherine has at the start of the movie.

In James’s novel, the doctor, even if doomed, feels pleasure in having

guessed Morris’s true intents. Here, Wyler’s doctor is evidently hurt and

defeated. He leaves the room causing a feeling of pity in the viewers,

passes under the door frame and ascends the staircase, close to his death.

Outside the house, with Catherine sitting on a bench, Maria announces

her mistress that the doctor is dying and he asking for her. Wyler places

89 Ibid., p. 275.

102

Catherine in profile again, the same position she had after being rejected,

near her embroidery. Before entering the house, Maria turns one last time

to see if the protagonist joins her, but Catherine does not move or show any

emotion.

In the final meeting between Catherine and Morris, the protagonist

reacts differently to the approaches of her suitor. If in the previous scenes

of courtship, Morris successfully had occupied Catherine’s space, the

situation is now different. Catherine is clearly detached from him both

physically and emotionally.

After leaving him outside the door, Catherine is once again caught in

profile and, after having cut the last thread of her embroidery, she takes the

lamp and climbs the stairs. Wearing a white dress, the heroine closes the

movie married to a life in which she is divorced from everyone.

Conclusion

In my research I tried to show how Henry James’s 1880 Washington

Square does not only represent a crucial point in his literary career, but also

raises many questions. The novel deals with different kinds of issues:

familiar, economic, societal, national themes and so on. Catherine, the anti-

heroine, is forced to fight her father in order to achieve her independence;

Doctor Sloper’s rationality is defeated and he has to surrender before his

daughter’s will; Morris is able to fool Catherine once, but, when he returns,

he finds a strong woman and not an innocent girl.

In Washington Square, James realistically depicts American society

and questions it and its cruel rules. He shows the battle of a lonely and

unloved young woman in a male-dominated world, where she is oppressed

by those men who try to take control over her life. Knowing that context so

well and having experienced some of Catherine’s difficulties, it is

understandable to notice James’s admiration for the heroine. Because

103

Catherine eventually becomes a heroine, even if not the average heroine

who is usually found in a novel.

Despite the criticism surrounding movie adaptations (and adaptations in

general) on their first representations on the screen, they have finally

become popular. Over the years, the skepticism has diminished and

adaptations have been considered as having their own importance, even if

derivative works.

Through The Heiress William Wyler has demonstrated it, directing a

successful movie. Moreover, he was capable of making innovations which

considered the needs of his audience and perfectly adhered to James’s

intentions. After adapting the Goetzes’ play for the screen, Wyler chose an

excellent cast: Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson and Olivia de

Havilland, who eventually even won the Oscar for Best Actress thanks to

her performance. With The Heiress, Wyler gave American women a way of

becoming aware of their own power and free from patriarchal and male

domination.

104

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